Snap is again with a brand new pair of AR sensible glasses, and for the primary time in years, it’s able to promote them to customers.
The firm plans to promote these new glasses, referred to as Specs, to customers beginning in 2026, CEO Evan Spiegel introduced on Tuesday in the course of the Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California. A Snap spokesperson tells TechCrunch the glasses will ship in 2026, as properly.
Snap’s Specs will function lots of the identical augmented actuality and synthetic intelligence capabilities which can be obtainable on the corporate’s developer-facing sensible glasses, the Spectacles 5. However, the corporate says the Specs will likely be smaller and lighter — ideally making them extra innocuous to put on in public than their extraordinarily massive predecessors.
The Specs will function see-through lenses able to displaying graphics to customers as in the event that they have been projected on the world in entrance of them. The glasses may also function an AI assistant powered by Snap’s expertise, able to processing each audio and video.
The Specs announcement comes almost a decade after Snap first tried to promote shopper sensible glasses with the preliminary launch of Spectacles in 2016 — a product that ended up promoting poorly. While Snap was forward of its time then, the corporate now faces fierce competitors within the AR glasses market from giants like Meta and Google, which have not too long ago unveiled AR merchandise of their very own.
Meta reportedly plans to unveil glasses with a built-in display screen, codenamed “Hypernova,” later in 2025. Meanwhile, Google not too long ago introduced partnerships with Warby Parker, Samsung, and different firms to develop its Android XR sensible glasses.
Snap is hoping its SnapOS developer ecosystem — which the corporate has spent the final a number of years constructing out — will give it an edge within the AR race. Many of the thousands and thousands of AR experiences builders have constructed for Snapchat and Spectacles, referred to as Lenses, may also work on the brand new Specs, the corporate stated.
Onstage, Spiegel showcased a number of of those lenses. One of them, “Super Travel,” will translate indicators and menus for customers in international nations. Another app Spiegel showcased, “Cookmate,” finds recipes primarily based on obtainable components in a consumer’s kitchen, after which provides step-by-step cooking steerage.
Companies have been demoing these use circumstances in AR for years however have struggled to ship a pair of sensible glasses which can be succesful, reasonably priced, and cozy sufficient to provide on a regular basis customers a style of AR. Snap appears to imagine it’s carried out simply that with Specs, however a number of particulars are nonetheless unclear.
Snap didn’t reveal on Tuesday how a lot the Specs will price, the way it plans to promote the glasses, or what precisely they appear to be.
Snap additionally introduced a number of developer updates to bolster its SnapOS platform. Developers can now construct apps powered by multimodal AI fashions from OpenAI and Google DeepMind. To allow extra AI apps, the corporate introduced a “Depth Module API” that can anchor AR graphics from massive language fashions in three-dimensional house.
In the longer term, Snap says it will likely be partnering with Niantic Spatial, the corporate that spun off from the creator of Pokémon Go, to construct AI-powered maps of the world.
Whether all of those efforts will translate right into a pair of sensible glasses that customers will actually need to purchase stays to be seen. While Meta has discovered early success with Ray-Ban Meta, it appears possible that Snap’s Specs will likely be considerably dearer. To get customers on board, Snap might have to show AR glasses from one thing novel right into a sensible gadget.
