Snap is again with a brand new pair of AR good glasses, and for the primary time in years, it’s able to promote them to shoppers.
The corporate plans to promote these new glasses, known as Specs, to shoppers beginning in 2026, CEO Evan Spiegel introduced on Tuesday through the Augmented World Expo in Lengthy Seaside, California. A Snap spokesperson tells TechCrunch the glasses will ship in 2026, as properly.
Snap’s Specs will function most of the identical augmented actuality and synthetic intelligence capabilities which can be obtainable on the corporate’s developer-facing good glasses, the Spectacles 5. Nevertheless, the corporate says the Specs will likely be smaller and lighter — ideally making them extra innocuous to put on in public than their extraordinarily giant predecessors.
The Specs will function see-through lenses able to displaying graphics to customers as in the event that they had been projected on the world in entrance of them. The glasses will even 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 good glasses with the preliminary launch of Spectacles in 2016 — a product that ended up promoting poorly. Whereas 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 just lately unveiled AR merchandise of their very own.
Meta reportedly plans to unveil glasses with a built-in display screen, codenamed “Hypernova,” later in 2025. In the meantime, Google just lately introduced partnerships with Warby Parker, Samsung, and different corporations to develop its Android XR good 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. Lots of the hundreds of thousands of AR experiences builders have constructed for Snapchat and Spectacles, known as Lenses, will even work on the brand new Specs, the corporate mentioned.
Onstage, Spiegel showcased just a few of those lenses. Certainly one of them, “Tremendous Journey,” will translate indicators and menus for customers in international international locations. One other app Spiegel showcased, “Cookmate,” finds recipes primarily based on obtainable components in a person’s kitchen, after which affords step-by-step cooking steerage.
Firms have been demoing these use instances in AR for years, however have struggled to ship a pair of good glasses which can be succesful, inexpensive, and comfy sufficient to present on a regular basis shoppers a style of AR. Snap appears to imagine it’s accomplished simply that with Specs, however a number of particulars are nonetheless unclear.
Snap didn’t reveal on Tuesday how a lot the Specs will value, the way it plans to promote the glasses, or what precisely they’ll appear to be.
Snap additionally introduced a number of developer updates to beef up its SnapOS platform. Builders 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 may anchor AR graphics from giant language fashions in three-dimensional house.
Sooner or later, 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 or not all of those efforts will translate right into a pair of good glasses that buyers will really wish to purchase stays to be seen. Whereas Meta has discovered early success with Ray-Ban Meta, it appears possible that Snap’s Specs will likely be considerably dearer. To get shoppers on board, Snap might have to show AR glasses from one thing novel right into a sensible system.