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SNAP plans to reboot smart glasses for consumers next year as social media companies rejoin the costly battle with Meta, Openai and Apple to create a wearable device powered by new artificial intelligence.
The Los Angeles-based company announced on Tuesday a new device called “spec” 10 years after its first camera glasses.
Since then, CEO Evan Spiegel has invested more than $3 billion to build and develop Snap’s proprietary hardware, optical components and operating systems for “augmented reality” eyewear, combining AI image recognition with the ability to display high-resolution 3D images.
“I think there’s a real understanding now that computers need to evolve truly meaningfully to fully realize the benefits and advancements of AI,” he told the Financial Times.
“I think investors now understand the need for a new type of computer. …Historically, when you look at computers, they’re not designed to really bring out the best in humanity.”
The success of Openai’s ChatGPT and other Chatbot assistants’ breakouts have triggered billions of dollars in Silicon Valley, creating a new AI-enabled product that allows you to swap your smartphone. This includes the $6.4 billion acquisition of Openai, hardware startup IO, of former Apple design chief Sir Jony Ive, last month.
Snapchat, a parent company of social media apps, faces a major tech rival in the race to build “wearable computing.”
Meta has been successful to some extent in collaboration with “Ray-Ban Meta” smart glasses with French AItalian eyewear giant Esilol Lu Kistica, while also moving forward with its own unique AR glasses prototype Orion. Last year, Apple released its “Mixed Reality” Vision Pro headset, but sales have been limited so far.
Spiegel said the Snap spec will take advantage of the growing interest in new devices that use AI in ways that smartphones can’t do today. “There’s a lot of the various necessary pieces to enable this new product,” he said.
Snap’s chief added that he is not concerned about the resistance from investors to higher risks and capital costs associated with consumer hardware. That’s what I learned in 2017 when I wrote down $40 million worth of excess inventory for unsold smart glasses.
Despite the rise of Snapchat’s monthly active user audience to over 900 million, Snap’s stock has lost almost half its worth over the past year as it faces fierce competition for advertising dollars from Meta and Tiktok. Since it was published in 2017, it has never reported annual profits.
It didn’t stop Spiegel – co-founder Bobby Murphy holds the company’s majority voting control through a special class of stock.
“What really matters is the ability to consistently invest in this vision over the past 11 years,” Spiegel says. “If we can achieve all kinds of consumer size, the business itself makes a lot of sense.”
SNAP has withheld many details of the specs, including its price and what it will look like until it is nearing release. Spiegel said the device is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and can run completely standalone without having to connect to smartphones and other accessories such as Tether “packs” needed to power Apple’s Vision Pro.
“In previous experiments, it has been extremely important for ease of use,” he said.
In 2021, SNAP acquired Waveoptics, a supplier of “waveguide” optical systems that use small prisms to create holographic images.
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The first version of what was previously known as Spectacles included a display, but it was released in 2021, but was sold only to app developers. Last year, the updated developer kit was released.
SNAP uses a combination of its own visual AI system and integrations with Openai, Google’s Gemini and Deepseek.
Spiegel hopes to provide the ability to see and understand what users are seeing and to overlay useful information in the right place via the display.
“The real exercises for us over the next few years will help the wider community distinguish between basic smart glasses and immersive AR glasses,” says Spiegel.
“The difference from the spec is that you can have a full workstation. You can use an immersive lens with your friends. You can bring AI into the world, rather than interacting with your voice or small screen.”
