I tried an AI food camera at CES 2026

One of my favorite things about CES is the opportunity to see wild concept devices. Not all of these are home runs (such as Razer’s AI anime girlfriend speaker), but they’re still fascinating glimpses into what some companies see as the future of consumer tech. Health/fitness brand Amazfit has two such concept devices at CES 2026 — the V1TAL Food Camera and Helio Smart Glasses — and I had the opportunity to try both.

The V1TAL is easily the most polarizing of the two, so let’s start there. I saw the V1TAL behind closed doors at last year’s CES, but this was the first time I could photograph it and see it more thoroughly. As for what it is, it’s exactly as I describe in the headline: an AI camera that watches you while you eat.

It works like this. Press a button on the V1TAL to reveal its camera, set it up for a clear view of what you’re eating, press the record button, eat your meal, and then end the recording. Within a few seconds, the recording is uploaded to the Amazfit app, and your meal is logged.

It’s the same basic concept as taking a picture of your meal with your phone to track what you eat, but instead of a single photo, the Amazfit V1TAL captures a still image every few seconds — showing not just what you ate but also how you ate it. As such, the V1TAL can see how much of your meal you actually ate, how quickly you ate it, and whether you focused on certain items on your plate while not touching others (e.g., skipping fruits or vegetables at dinner).

From here, Amazfit’s AI analyzes the data and provides recommendations/insights on your eating habits in the companion app. You may receive a recommendation to eat more slowly if you finished your meal too quickly, or a gentle reminder that you left your broccoli untouched.

Without a doubt, this is more insightful than snapping a regular photo of your meals. For someone who’s closely monitoring their diet to lose weight or gain muscle, a device like the V1TAL could be useful. But even for those people, and especially for folks who casually log what they eat, is that extra bit of information worth the effort of setting up a dedicated food camera for every meal? That’s what Amazfit is still trying to figure out as it develops the V1TAL.

The other Amazfit device I saw, and the one I’m more personally interested in, is the Helios Smart Glasses. This is a very early prototype (just like the V1TAL is), so the design is far from final. However, the core idea behind them is really neat.

Rather than serving as a notification hub, as most smart glasses do, the Helios Smart Glasses are designed for fitness. When paired with an Amazfit smartwatch, the glasses can display information like your steps, distance, and pace during a run or cycling session. If you’re following a route on your watch, you’ll see turn-by-turn directions on the glasses as well. You see this information at about the midpoint of your line of sight, and even on the early model I was testing, it looked sharp and high-quality.

Amazfit has no firm launch plans for either the V1TAL Food Camera or Helios Smart Glasses, and, as noted above, both devices are very early prototypes. Nothing here is set in stone.

While I’m not 100% sold on the V1TAL, I am curious to see how Amazfit continues to develop it. I’m much more gung-ho about the Helios Smart Glasses, and I can’t wait for Amazfit to (hopefully) bring them to market. More than anything, I’m just glad to see Amazfit explore new categories like this. These are unquestionably very creative gadgets, and that’s exactly what I like to see at CES.