Twenty Years, One Mission

2005, France: A Vision for "Seeing"

The story does not begin in Hangzhou. It begins in France.

In 2005 — before smartphones existed, seven years before Google Glass would appear — the precursor to this team was already asking a serious engineering question: could the power of computation be overlaid directly onto the real world in front of people's eyes?

This was not science fiction. They chose a path almost no one had taken: researching optical see-through imaging technology — making a lens into a transparent display, allowing virtual information and physical reality to coexist in the same field of view.

2011, Hangzhou: Bringing the Idea Home

In 2011, the team established itself in Hangzhou as a Sino-French joint venture. At the time, Hangzhou had not yet produced its celebrated tech companies, and AR glasses were a concept almost no one in China was paying attention to.

They arrived carrying years of optical know-how developed in French laboratories and set about developing and manufacturing some of China's earliest AR smart glasses. The team released the PMD (monocular) and MG1 (binocular) professional-grade AR glasses for enterprise users. In 2013 came the consumer-oriented EPW, using a curved-mirror reflective approach — unlike Google Glass's waveguide route, this design produced a larger imaging area, a centred display more aligned with natural human observation, and a 23-degree field of view equivalent to a 48-inch screen viewed from three metres.

It was an era with few cheering them on. AR glasses were too early; the market was not ready, and neither was capital. But the technology was there.

The Internet Era: Exploring Wearables and AI

Over the following years, the team continued to explore during China's internet entrepreneurship wave. The direction was clear: if hardware could go this far, what could software and AI accomplish?

If a pair of glasses has a camera, computing power, and network connectivity — what genuinely valuable thing can it do for people? Industrial inspection, remote guidance, mobile work… all were candidate directions.

But one question kept lodging itself in the team's mind like a splinter:

2018: Turning Toward Those Who Need It Most

In January 2018, Eyecoming was officially founded. This was not a startup from zero — it was a pivot taken after more than a decade of accumulated technical understanding.

The team redirected every capability built up in AR hardware development — lightweight design, low-latency video transmission, weak-network optimisation, optical image stabilisation — toward a single community: the visually impaired.

The platform's core is a remote volunteer assistance system: a visually impaired user sends a help request via phone or glasses; the system pushes it to dozens of online volunteers in the same city; the first person to answer becomes that user's eyes in that moment.

The glasses play a supporting role in this system — they free the user's hands, removing the need to hold a phone; the camera stays trained forward, giving the remote volunteer a natural, stable view of the user's environment.

A Counter-Intuitive Conviction

Once the platform was running, the team noticed a problem most similar products ignore. Many volunteers reported: they'd registered, but went weeks without receiving a single call. The impulse to help needs timely affirmation. A volunteer who stays "on standby" indefinitely without ever being needed will eventually quietly turn off notifications — and forget the whole thing.

This led the team to a realisation: the platform is not only serving visually impaired users — it is equally serving its volunteers. A platform that gives volunteers a continuously meaningful experience is the only kind that is truly sustainable. So Eyecoming made a decision that looked counter-intuitive to the rest of the industry:

2019: Recognition on the Global Stage

In September 2019, at IFA in Berlin, HONOR and Eyecoming jointly launched PocketVision to the world — the first time in the low-vision assistive device field that an AI assistive tool was combined with mainstream consumer smartphone hardware.

Six languages. Endorsement from the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB, UK). Recognition from the UK's specialist optics media, AOP. Years of accumulated technology, applied in a public-benefit context, were finally seen on an international stage.

2026: Twenty Years On, Back to the Beginning

This year, Eyecoming will complete a new round of updates to its app for blind users. The direction is not the accumulation of features — it is a renewed focus on the platform's public-benefit essence: finer-grained volunteer matching, higher quality in every connection.

From an optical concept in a French laboratory in 2005, to Hangzhou's first AR glasses production line in 2011, to years of exploring how wearables and AI could be combined during the internet era, to the 2018 pivot toward assistive technology for the visually impaired, to today —