Huawei just patented AR glasses whose strap pops off and becomes a smart ring you wear to navigate virtual worlds. The key is timing. Smart rings are exploding—$417 million market in 2025, heading to $2.5 billion by 2032 at 29% CAGR. XR headsets still suck at hand tracking—occlusion kills inputs constantly when hands overlap. And OpenXR just standardized how all inputs talk to all headsets.
Three markets are converging. And nobody's built the bridge.
Here's the play: Build OpenRing SDK—the translation layer that turns any smart ring into XR controller. Don't manufacture rings. Don't build headsets. Own the middleware that makes them talk. Think Stripe for spatial input—every ring manufacturer needs you, every XR developer wants you, and you take a cut of both sides.
The Market Is Screaming for This
Smart rings are mainstream now. Samsung's Galaxy Ring made "smart ring" a household phrase in 2024. The global smart ring market size is projected to grow from $416.9 million in 2025 to $2,525.5 million by 2032, at a CAGR of 29.3%. Oura, Ultrahuman, and dozens of Chinese manufacturers are flooding the market with hardware. They all have BLE. They all have IMUs. None of them talk to XR.
Vision-only hand tracking breaks constantly. Meta admits it. Occlusions, low light, and fast motion degrade UX. When your hands overlap—which happens constantly in normal VR use—tracking fails. When you grab a prop, tracking dies. Poor lighting? Reflective surfaces? Say goodbye to smooth tracking. The dirty secret: camera-based tracking needs help.
OpenXR just solved the standards problem. Unity's XR Hands package went live with OpenXR support. The hand interaction profile is designed for runtimes which provide hand inputs using hand tracking devices instead of controllers. Every major engine supports it. The abstraction layer exists. Someone just needs to feed it data.
Why Rings Beat Everything Else
Wrist trackers tried this. HTC's Vive Wrist Tracker proved inertial assists work. But wrist trackers are bulky, $129 each, and scream "I'm in VR."
Smart rings are different:
- Invisible tech: Looks like jewelry, not gear
- Always-on potential: People wear rings 24/7 (unlike controllers they lose)
- Finger-level precision: IMU at the fingertip catches micro-gestures wrist trackers miss
- Price collapse coming: BOM dropping below $30 as volumes scale
The form factor won. Now it needs software.
The Technical Play (It's Simpler Than You Think)
Three integration points. That's it.
- BLE Input Layer
- Connect via BLE-HID for clicks/taps (standard protocol)
- Stream raw IMU via GATT for orientation/acceleration
- Genki Wave already exposes BLE + APIs for motion data
Vault-only access.
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