The revolutionary Alipay+ transaction with a payment solution for global e-wallets embedded within Meizu StarV Snap smart glasses is an important milestone for the whole fintech industry.
Ant Group’s unified wallet gateway service, Alipay+, successfully performed its debut AI-powered smart glasses payment transaction via embedded e-wallet in partnership with Meizu and AlipayHK.
The new feature will be available to Alipay+’s global e-wallet partners by the end of 2025, as part of a broader rollout for its upgraded tech suite for smart glasses, unveiled earlier with Rokid’s AR glasses in-store payments. It expands the Alipay smart payment offering suite, which includes AI-driven payments powered by the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and NFC-enabled support for both QR code and card-based transactions.
Users can now make payments directly through their smart glasses, either by scanning a QR code or using voice commands. This is made possible by Alipay+’s advanced artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, including voice control, intent recognition, gesture detection, camera-based scanning, and voiceprint authentication for security.
The innovative digital transaction was facilitated by Meizu StarV Snap smart glasses – a groundbreaking wearable that integrates AR technology with e-wallet payments. With the help of an embedded Near Field Communication (NFC) chip, a lightweight, AI-powered payment engine, and Alipay+’s upgraded smart wearable framework, which includes APIs and SDKs optimized for AR form factors, Meizu’s AR display can project payment prompts, confirmation messages, and QR codes directly into the user’s field of view. Meanwhile, voiceprint authentication enables users to initiate and confirm a transaction with simple words.
The groundbreaking payment was made via AlipayHK, Hong Kong’s leading superapp, with over 4.2 million active users and accepted at over 150,000 local merchants, including supermarkets, restaurants, convenience stores, and online platforms.
The innovation is a milestone for embedded payments, illustrating that smart glasses can also be used for hands-free purchases without a phone or cards involved. This adds a real-world, practical use to AR glasses, which were mostly used for fun, gaming, or specific tech purposes before.
Even with these limited use cases, the market for smart glasses is growing rapidly, and today, there are over 3.5 million AR glasses in use worldwide. As hardware evolves (e.g., better displays, smaller form factors, smarter features), the global base could approach tens of millions by 2026–2028, then scale into the hundreds of millions by 2030. The global reach of AR hardware is forecast to continuously increase between 2024 and 2029 by over 96 million users. If payments enter the scenario, the numbers might grow exponentially, indicating an essential opportunity for payment providers.
