LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA - JUNE 16: Evan Spiegel, Co-Founder and CEO, Snap Inc. unveils SPECS onstage at AWE 2026 at Long Beach Convention & Entertainment Center on June 16, 2026 in Long Beach, California. (Photo by Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for Snap)

Getty Images for Snap

This year’s edition of Augmented World Expo (AWE), which took place in Long Beach, CA last week, featured plenty of new and forward-looking announcements. But despite big news from Snap, XReal, and Viture, alongside other players, several attendees were haunted by the past.

Specifically, they were haunted by the twin failures of the Hololens and Magic Leap headsets. “We spent all this time and so many resources building for the Hololens,” said one head of training, “And then the rug was pulled out from underneath us. It’s hard to trust other companies who say they are committed to headsets and glasses, because there’s nothing to say we won’t have to pivot and start again in five years.”

Of course, pivoting with technology trends is par for the course to a certain extent – companies routinely change and update websites and build new apps. But the last several years have been rife with false starts and tech that seemed promising at the time, only to not play out. Firms bought virtual real estate in the metaverse and made NFTs for…reasons. A friend at a large bank told me that only a few months after her CEO encouraged everyone to use AI for every single task they could think of, he sent a memo asking staff to curb token usage. So the fact that enterprises are being wary about adopting new immersive technologies stands to reason, even though there is ample evidence that it can provide tangible benefits.

Luckily, three of the major announcements coming out of AWE this year were geared towards enterprise on some level. That sort of volume – and the fact that Meta, Google, and Snap are all in the smartglasses space, alongside several Chinese companies – is a testament to the belief that glasses will be the next computing form factor, and even if one player disappears or there is consolidation, others will come in to pick up the slack.

Start with Snap, whose CEO Evan Spiegel opened the conference. Snap was an early player in the smartglasses market, releasing camera-equipped sunglasses back in 2016, but has struggled to find product/market fit in recent years. The newly announced Specs, however, represent a huge leap forward, as they don’t need to be tethered to a smartphone or charging puck. Users can interact with an AI agent via the glasses, as well as watching content, recording, and interacting with augmented reality experiences.

During the keynote, Spiegel positioned the glasses as a consumer device, and a brooding, black-and-white celebrity driven marketing campaign hammered his point home. But with a $2,195 initial price point, it seems unlikely that consumers will adopt these en masse initially. Enterprise, however, can handle the cost, and the robust feature set will set it up as a solid potential replacement for other devices, or a compelling new platform.

XReal also made waves, announcing its collaboration with Google, the Aura. The glasses weigh under 95 grams, and are powered by the new Snapdragon Reality Elite chip, Qualcomm’s latest XR platform. The chip, in combination with Google’s Android XR, aims to help the Aura glasses to meet demands for “better immersive experiences, higher performance, greater intelligence, and improved power optimization,” according to a statement from Qualcomm’s XR head, Ziad Asghar.

The price is capped at $1500, which makes the glasses cheaper than Specs; but whereas Specs are standalone, the Aura is powered by an external battery pack. The Aura also has AI capabilities, powered by Google Gemini.

The third major announcement was the release of the Viture Helix glasses. Built on NVIDIA’s XR AI solution, Helix streams a wearer’s first-person perspective to a multimodal AI in real time, enabling AI-assisted coaching, compliance, and full-provenance capture of every shift worn. Helix builds on a successful collaboration between Viture, NVIDIA, the Le Cong Lab at Stanford University, and the Mengdi Wang Lab at Princeton University, where the platform has already been used to enable AI-assisted workflows across wet-lab, clinical, and life sciences research environments. Helix is expected to begin shipping in Q1 2027, with pricing starting from $600.

The announcement of these three glasses, alongside continuous updates from Meta and the forthcoming Google glasses, are a testament to how much tech companies are betting on glasses as the next form factor for computing and interaction. Enterprise should start now but push the smartglasses manufacturers to provide deployment support and commitment that was missing in the HoloLens era; while nothing is ever truly certain, it would go a long way to helping CFOs and heads of innovation sleep at night.