Snap

It's been almost five years since Snap began experimenting with standalone augmented reality glasses. Now, the company is finally ready to start selling them to the public, though they won't be cheap.

During a keynote today at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel unveiled the company's latest AR Specs that he said represent "the beginning of a new era in computing." The $2,195 glasses come with a wider field of view, upgraded battery life and, perhaps most importantly, a slimmed down form factor compared with the oversized, developer-only glasses it showed off in 2024.

The latest Specs come in two sizes: 47mm and 52mm, which weigh 132 grams and 136 grams, respectively. They still don't look exactly like a "normal" pair of glasses, but they look less oversized than the boxy, 226-gram Specs from a few years ago. Despite the smaller frame, Snap has managed to boost the field of view from 46 to 51 degrees. And battery life now comes in at four hours of "mixed use." The company didn't indicate how much of that time includes the display, but considering the older Specs couldn't even last a full hour, it sounds like a significant improvement.

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The glasses are powered by a two-chip setup similar to their predecessor, with one Qualcomm Snapdragon processor handling computer vision and the other running AR apps, or what Snap calls "Lenses." Inside the actual lenses, Snap says it has redesigned its waveguide tech that enables augmented reality capabilities.

The company describes Specs as a "wearable computer," and the glasses come with a built-in browser and can provide "contextual AI assistance," thanks to partnerships with OpenAI and Google. Snap has spent the last few years building out a catalog of hundreds of developer-made AR Lenses for Specs. These Include shared games, as well as more "useful" lenses that can take advantage of Specs' multimodal AI powers.

"Imagine walking through a city and seeing directions exactly where you need them, measuring a space without pulling out a tape measure, or getting help from AI while you're working on a project instead of stopping to search for an answer," Snap writes in a blog post. The company is also offering developers a revamped version of its AR development software, Lens Studio, that allows them to use AI coding tools like Claude Code and Cursor to speed up the process of creating new apps for the platform.

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Now, the question is how many people are willing to buy into Snap's vision for augmented reality. At $2,195, Specs feel like they are for a slightly different audience than the average Snapchat user. The glasses are close to three times as much as Meta's Ray-Ban Display glasses, though those are much more limited in their capabilities. But at a time when there are few standalone AR glasses out there, Specs come with some intriguing features.

The company is taking pre-orders for the new Specs now for a refundable deposit of $200. The glasses are expected to start shipping sometime in the fall to the US, UK and France.