Augmented reality (AR) hasn’t exactly set the world on fire. As such, we don’t see much of it in the news anymore, especially with AI now the focal point for nearly every major tech innovation. Apparently, Snapchat is still championing the tech. At least, that looks to be the case with the announcement of the Snap Specs.
A pair of augmented reality glasses, the wearable isn’t designed to connect to a separate PC or any other machine like some AR devices we’ve seen in the past. Instead, it’s completely standalone with a built-in computer right on the glasses powering the AR experiences.
The Snap Specs are built into chunky eyeglass frames that just look way too big to be an ordinary pair of glasses. It’s a bold design, to say the least. Both of the lenses come with display systems that the outfit says is a “proprietary liquid crystal on silicon technology.” Whatever that actually means, each display comes with a 51-degree field of view and support for 16 million colors. According to the outfit, the display can feel like a 24-inch desktop monitor if you’re using it for work or a 115-inch home cinema at around 10-feet away if you’re using it to watch movies.
Inside the lenses are billions of waveguides that enable the device’s augmented reality capabilities. To the unfamiliar, waveguides are ultra-thin, see-through light pipes used in most kinds of smart glasses to control the direction of light, so you can still see the real world clearly while overlaying digital items on top of it. The outfit claims their waveguides have been redesigned to be clearer and more seamless compared to previous iterations. The lenses, by the way, are also electrochromic, so they can go from clear to tinted in just 10 seconds.
The Snap Specs are equipped with two RGB cameras, one for visible light and one infrared, which it uses to capture the scene out front for digital recreation, while also serving as the primary sensors for hand-tracking and 6DoF tracking. Inside, it houses two Snapdragon processors that handle all the computing tasks, with one processor focused on computer vision and the other tasked with running the AR lenses. According to Snap, this dual processor setup enables fast hand tracking, low latency, and responsive interactions in all sorts of different settings. There’s no word on whether it has onboard speakers, but given how similar wearables usually integrate on the temples, we’re assuming it has them there as well.
The onboard battery is rated for up to four hours of mixed use for the device before draining, although it also comes with a charging case that can refill it with up to four additional charges. It runs Snap OS, which currently has hundreds of available lenses, so there are plenty of AR experiences to play with right off the bat, including games, AI-assisted tools, and more. The company is also offering devs a new version of its Lens Studio software that lets them incorporate coding tools like Claude Code and Cursor to help speed up the process of creating new apps.
The Snap Specs go on sale later this year during the fall, priced at $2,195.