Snap, the parent company of social network Snapchat, on Tuesday launched its Specs augmented reality glasses, a major bet by a struggling company to stake out ground in the post-smartphone era.

Unveiled at the Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California, the Specs are the first standalone augmented reality glasses aimed at the general public, according to the company.

They will go on sale in the fall in the United States, the United Kingdom and France, and can be reserved starting Tuesday for $2,195.

Snap is targeting a middle ground: glasses more sophisticated than the models offered by Meta and soon Google, which CEO Evan Spiegel sees more as a "phone accessory," and less bulky and costly than headsets, which he called "very capable and immersive, but ... cumbersome to wear and shut you out of the world."

"Ultimately we believe that unless we can bring computing into the world where we live ... it's going to be very, very hard to make it feel more human," Spiegel told AFP.

The difference is in how they work: glasses like Meta's Ray-Ban Display or a planned Google device simply project a flat screen in front of the wearer's eye.

"So it feels like you have a tiny little phone screen stuck to your eye everywhere you look," Spiegel said.

Specs, by contrast, map the surrounding world and project three-dimensional digital objects that interact with the real world seen through the lenses.

Snap is touting a price lower than that of mixed-reality headsets such as Apple's Vision Pro, which launched at $3,499 and whose maker has since halted development for lack of sales.

"By being able to offer Specs at $2,195, we're able to take this really, really advanced technology and try to put it in as many people's hands as possible," Spiegel said.

The market remains embryonic.

Meta dominates with its Ray-Ban glasses, more than seven million of which have been sold, but its dedicated division is losing billions of dollars.

Google has announced connected glasses for the fall, and Samsung has been selling a headset running Google's Android XR system since October.

Asked by AFP, Spiegel disclosed no profit margins, production volumes or sales target, saying he measures the success of the Specs by developers' creativity rather than by financial indicators.

The launch comes as Snap, which has been in the red since its 2017 stock market debut, cut 16 percent of its workforce in April, or about 1,000 jobs.

The group claimed nearly 956 million monthly users for Snapchat in the first quarter.

The product unveiled Tuesday is the one that activist fund Irenic Capital Management, a Snap shareholder, has demanded be shut down or sold off, denouncing an operation it says has absorbed more than $3.5 billion.