At AWE 2026, the Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, Samsung showed a display panel that hits 40,000 nits of brightness. As the technology develops and gets more affordable, it's a fix for a problem every pair of AR glasses currently has: keeping what you see on the display clear and readable in direct sunlight.
For comparison, your iPhone does 2,000 nits outdoors and your Apple Watch does the same. The best OLED TVs on the market today top out around 2,000 to 2,500 nits in real use. Those are the products of years of display engineering from two of the best teams in the business. Samsung's new panel promises 20 times that.
A phone screen is opaque. It blocks out whatever is behind it and points light directly at your eye. AR glasses can't do that because you're looking through them at the real world. The projected image sits on top of what you see, which means it has to fight the sky, the sun, and every bright surface around you. Step outside on a clear day and the display gets washed out. There's even a cottage industry of rubber covers that exist specifically to snap over the front of the frame and block outside light entirely, turning your see-through AR glasses into an opaque headset just to keep the display readable.
Most glasses designed to be worn both indoors and outdoors use a waveguide, a thin piece of engineered glass embedded in the lens that carries a projected image to your eye while keeping the lens transparent. The problem is waveguides lose most of the light along the way. Some designs waste roughly 99% of what the projector puts out. So the projector has to start with a ludicrous amount of light just to land enough at your eye to read.
Some AR glasses handle this with tinted lenses. The Ray-Ban Display uses photochromic lenses, the same Transitions technology in regular prescription glasses, which react to UV light and can take close to a minute to darken. Snap's Specs, launching this fall, use electrochromic lenses, the same technology that dims the windows on a Boeing 787, which shift in about 10 seconds. Both mean your view of the world gets darker every time the sun comes out, and you always look like you're wearing sunglasses outside even if you don't want to.
Samsung showed two panels at AWE 2026. The first was a 40,000-nit, 1.3-inch RGB OLEDoS panel demonstrated in a dark-room installation. At that size it's better suited to a headset than glasses, but Samsung pitches it for both. The panel actually built into the prototype AR glasses on the show floor was a smaller 0.62-inch RGB OLEDoS, driving real-time translation, navigation, and weather data overlaid on a projected Long Beach coastline. Samsung didn't give a brightness number for that smaller one, so the glasses themselves aren't confirmed to hit anywhere near 40,000 nits. What the show proved is that the technology is catching up to make future generations of smart glasses materially more useful than where we're at today.
Samsung has been showing increasingly bright panels at trade shows for years. It debuted 5,000 nits at SID 2024, 10,000 nits at CES 2025, 20,000 nits at AWE 2025, and 40,000 nits now. None have shipped in a consumer glasses product yet. Manufacturing RGB OLEDoS at scale is still being worked out — the process is difficult enough that a large share of panels come out defective, which keeps costs high. And the market for AR glasses isn't large enough yet to justify the investment. Samsung's own pitch is that RGB OLEDoS is actually simpler to manufacture than older panel types because it skips the color filter layer, which they say gives them an advantage as volume eventually grows.
The technology to fix the brightness problem exists. A shippable pair of glasses built around it does not, yet.