- Snap’s AR glasses have been announced
- Specs will launch later this year and cost $2,195
- They’re an upgraded version of its Specs developer kit
After joining the chorus of brands promising consumer smart glasses would arrive in 2026 at last year’s Augmented World Expo, Snap (formerly Snapchat) has finally debuted its latest Specs at this year’s AWE — announcing its true AR glasses are shipping later this year to the UK, US, and France. They’re incredible, truly sci-fi, and cost $2,195 (Around £1,640).
That high cost is explained by all the different XR tech the Specs combine into a single gadget. You have the form factor of glasses that are (relatively) lightweight, with a pair of clear displays built into the electrochromic lenses to overlay digital elements on the real world, and cameras to track your hands and anchor points in the space around you so that the spatial features feel as real as physical objects.
The glasses are powered by a pair of Qualcomm Snapdragon chips — matching the Apple Vision Pro’s approach, as one handles the OS and your apps, while the other tackles spatial aspects like hand and position tracking and anchoring.
Removable inserts can support a range of eyeglass prescriptions, and the batteries can deliver “up to four hours of mixed-use.” You’ll get a charging case for an additional four charges (for 20 hours of total use), and, of course, there’s built-in AI assistance.
Best of all, this isn’t some unavailable prototype. It’s a real gadget you’ll be able to buy this Fall (aka September, October, or November). There’s nothing quite like the Snap Specs on the market right now, and that’s a major advantage for Snap as it leapfrogs Meta, Android XR, and the rest.
Truly fantastical
Reactions online from many have been pretty negative, with folks asking, “Why can’t anybody make a normal looking pair of glasses,” and “that’s gonna be a hard no from me dawg.” However, I’m very excited to take these glasses for a whirl.
I’ve not used these Snap Specs specifically yet, but I have had several chances to try their predecessor — a developer kit with essentially the same capabilities — and they do stand alone amongst the growing sea of smart glasses. AI and basic XR features are cool and certainly feel futuristic, but Snap’s Specs take things a step further with true AR that feels positively science fiction every time I experience them.
Where they succeed best is in social interactions. During a live demo, I experienced a three-way conversation between two Snap representatives and me. We were each speaking a different language, but we could communicate perfectly as the Specs displayed live translation subtitles above our heads in near real time.
In another demo — this time of the game Peridot — we could all bring along our virtual pets into a shared space to play together as a group as if our critters were all really there in the room, and in another AR drawing app we could create and collaborate virtual sculptures and then walk through the room together as if in our own gallery — as each person’s creation appeared for everyone in the place it had been drawn as if it were a real object in the space.
Into the unknown
Unfortunately, these demos require each person to have a pair of Specs, and at $2,195, I expect they’re too pricey for mass adoption.
There are two other important unknowns.
Firstly: comfort. At 132g or 136g (based on which size of Snap Specs you buy), these AR glasses weigh almost three times as much as standard Meta Ray-Bans, and roughly double the monocular Ray-Ban Displays.
This is a lot less than a headset, with models like the Quest 3 and Samsung Galaxy XR clocking in at over 500g, but the form factor of glasses will make the weight feel different, and so we’ll have to wait and see if these chunky specs are something you can wear for a whole day. In my demos, they were comfortable enough, but only for an hour or so at a time.
More crucially, a big question is software.
Snap has showcased several AR Glasses applications, such as getting visual instructions from the AI assistant for a simple car repair, watching a video on a large virtual screen, navigating a real-world map, and real-time translation.
Plus, there are third-party apps for things like cooking and golf assistance, drawing tools for AR and real-world art, games including darts, Peridot, and an official Avatar: The Last Airbender experience, and more are promised.
It all looks great, but when the Specs cost $2,195, they have a high bar to clear out the gate. They can’t be a one-and-done thing either. They’ll need to be a growing platform that feels more valuable over time, with new experiences and features added. Otherwise, early adopters could feel let down, and the early hype will die.
The silver lining is that, for long-term affordability, there’s some hope. Thanks to the RAM crisis and other component cost increases, thanks to AI and global trade disruptions, tech is pricier than ever. If / when these troubles dissipate, we’ll hopefully see prices fall, and they could fall rather steeply.
We can’t know what the future holds, but I have my hopes that upcoming generations of the Snap Specs and glasses like them will be a lot more affordable. Hopefully, Snap’s current model is popular enough and impressive enough to deliver that AR future I’m dreaming of.
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/RXKCCDv8PbGy9n2yZvV2MH-1920-80.jpg
Source link
hamish.hector@futurenet.com (Hamish Hector)
