The AWE (Augmented World Expo) 2026 conference kicked off this week in Long Beach, California. The first two days were jam-packed with announcements from industry leaders like Applied Materials, Google, Qualcomm, Snap, and XREAL. The opening keynote was given by none other than AWE’s founder, Ori Inbar, who reminded the audience that AI and spatial computing are complementary technologies and that agentic AI will still benefit from spatial context.

Snap Announces the New SPECS

Snap’s CEO Evan Spiegel delivered a keynote introducing the company’s next-generation AR glasses, called SPECS. SPECS are the commercial follow-up to the developer-only Spectacles announced a few years ago, designed to help developers plan for full AR glasses. The new SPECS glasses feature a 51-degree field of view and are completely standalone. The glasses are powered by a pair of Snapdragon processors that share the load of running the dual AR displays and rendering to them at high resolution. The glasses feature a four-hour battery life and can also be recharged via the case for all-day use. The pins on the sides of the glasses surprised me by providing both power and data, enabling continuous power or connecting to a smartphone or PC for virtual display via USB-C.

Snap has a completely new software and hardware architecture for SPECS, including a new operating system, which I believe will attract many new developers and please existing ones. Snap also claims an industry-leading 7ms motion-to-photon latency in these glasses, making them extremely performant and responsive. The glasses will come in 47mm and 52mm sizes, with varying weights. Speaking of weight, some people have mentioned that the weight for these glasses is a bit high, but I think the weight must account for the considerable batteries, which will help counterweight the front of the glasses. Comfort assessments should be held until the product launches. Snap says the retail price will be $2,195, and that they will be available this fall.

Qualcomm Accelerates Spatial AI with New Chip and START Program

Qualcomm’s XR business is now part of its broader personal AI business, headed up by Ziad Asghar. He spoke on stage about the company’s journey in personal AI and how its chips now power a broad array of wearable devices. He introduced the company’s new START (Scalable Turnkey AI-Ready Toolkit) program, which combines silicon, software, and scale to help deliver AR through an AI glasses module, pre-configured software, and manufacturing partnerships with companies like Applied Materials and Pegatron. I believe this program will help accelerate time-to-market for companies looking to bring glasses to market, thereby enabling more competition and giving consumers more choices.

In addition to the START program, Qualcomm also announced a new class of spatial computing chip: the Snapdragon Reality Elite. Qualcomm claims this chip has a CPU up to 30% faster, a GPU up to 60% faster, and an NPU up to 160% faster than the last-generation XR2+ Gen 2. The first product to take advantage of this new and improved chipset is none other than XREAL’s Project Aura. This is great timing for XREAL, as the company is finally going to deliver Aura as an actual product, dropping the project status and renaming it. Google went on stage at AWE to discuss the latest status of XREAL’s Aura, which has long been seen as a joint effort among Google, Qualcomm, and XREAL. Google also went into more depth about Android XR, split compute, and some of the intelligent eyewear it has coming as a reprise of what it already talked about at Google I/O, which I recently attended.

Applied Materials Expands Its Scope Within the Industry

Applied Materials signed a long-term joint development agreement with the glasses giant EssilorLuxottica to help accelerate the commercialization of next-generation AI-powered smart eyewear. The combination of the two companies’ expertise should yield better smart eyewear for the industry and offer consumers more options with greater personalization. The companies will work together to research and develop optical technologies across the entire augmented reality stack built around waveguides that Applied Materials already knows how to manufacture.

This partnership builds on Applied Materials’ new SENZ platform, which combines waveguide optics, light engines, sensing, vision correction, and electronic dimming into a single system for next-generation display smart glasses. SENZ seeks to create a complete, co-optimized solution that reduces time-to-market, simplifies manufacturing complexity, and enables greater customization. The industry has previously relied heavily on component suppliers partnering to develop custom solutions or prequalifying a few components, but rarely on a single complete solution. The SENZ platform will also depend on Applied Materials’ strategic partnership with GlobalFoundries to scale production using the Singapore facility and collaborating with Qualcomm on the START program.