Snapchat owner Snap has officially announced plans to begin selling its first AR glasses, Specs (formerly Spectacles), to a wider audience in 2026, the company’s CEO Evan Spiegel announced at the Augmented World Expo conference in Long Beach, California. The device is positioned as one of the possible successors to smartphones in the future.
Image source: snap.com
Spectacles glasses were first introduced in 2016 as a first-person video recording device. The latest version, released in 2021, added augmented reality (AR) support. Details about the technical specifications of the new model are still reluctant to be revealed, but according to sources familiar with the prototypes, the next generation of glasses – now under the new name Specs – will be thinner and lighter than the previous version, and will also have a wider field of view, allowing virtual elements to be displayed on most of the lenses.
The exact price of the device has not yet been announced, but Spiegel admitted that it will be cheaper than the Apple Vision Pro ($3,499), but more expensive than the Meta✴ Ray-Ban smart glasses, which cost about $300. The name Spectacles was replaced with Specs, since users themselves have long since switched to this abbreviation.
As The Verge reports, Snap has invested $3 billion in Spectacles to date, a small amount compared to many competitors like Meta✴. However, Spiegel sees Snapchat’s vast ecosystem, which has 1 billion monthly users, as an advantage. There are already around 400,000 developers creating augmented reality effects, filters, and lenses, some of which support multiplayer and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. There are also plans to integrate the MyAI chatbot, which is already available in the Snapchat app.
Snap is also developing “spatial intelligence” technology that will allow the glasses to analyze camera images without sending data to a server, which is important from a privacy standpoint. The company is also partnering with Niantic Spatial, a subsidiary of the developer of Pokémon Go, to create “next-generation AI maps” for AR devices to interact with the real world.