As we found out a few months ago at AWE 2025, Snap Specs are set to launch for consumers to buy next year — ending a multi-year developer path and putting them directly in the hands of people like me and you.
After talking to Snap’s VP of hardware, Scott Myers, it’s clear that the company is working on the biggest challenges when it comes to the physical design of these glasses. But what about software? Well, I got to try out the first significant consumer-friendly update in Snap OS 2.0 that will run on these upcoming specs, and to say I’ve been left a little mindblown would be an understatement.
As I’ve said, the real next generation of smart glasses will occur when you get AR and AI coming hand-in-hand in the same product. In just a few demos of what the consumer Snap Specs will have, I believe these will usher in that next generation — thanks to the huge ecosystem of Lenses. Let me tell you about them.
VR headset smarts in a pair of glasses
In terms of what you can buy right now, there are plenty of impressive pairs of smart glasses — most recently, the Rokid Glasses have been impressing me quite a bit (more on those in a future review).
However, every pair you see has one fundamental crutch. Namely, it needs a phone to be connected. Not that this is a problem at the moment, because everybody walks around with a phone, so of course, they might as well take the computing power from that device to do all the thinking/processing. But this can introduce latency, as well as not really being my idyllic future of ditching the phone and just having specs do everything.
The alternative workaround we’re seeing from the likes of Meta’s Project Orion and Project Aura from Xreal is popping all that silicon in a puck. Instead, the current developer Spectacles and the incoming Snap Specs look set to change that paradigm by putting everything you need into the glasses themselves.
In this current model, Snap’s pulling this off with dual Snapdragon processors, four cameras (two of them being infrared computer vision), stereo speakers and a six-microphone array. Finish that off with waveguide displays sporting a 46-degree field of view, and you’ve got a pretty fully-loaded package that will enable all the speed and smarts of your standard VR headset in a pair of glasses.
And the end result is (in my opinion) a game-changer for spatial computing, augmenting the world around you and AI smarts to make sure you’re the smartest person in any room. I’ve done developer demos before, but this is the first time I’ve seen the consumer vision for Snap Specs, and it’s mighty impressive.
Tip-off
First off, with Snap OS 2.0, I dipped into something called Spatial Tips: an app that uses multimodal AI to understand what it sees and give you advice around it.
It’s all good having a voice to give you instructions on how to do an ollie on a skateboard, but it’s an entirely different thing seeing the steps in front of you.
Not only that, but those steps are clearly labelled at each individual part of the board to let you know where to push up from and where your feet should be. Of course, this works with more than just skateboarding, and in every scenario, object recognition comes with the AI smarts to put a clearly pinned label on the item you’re talking about. This is seriously cool.
Translation aplenty
When it comes to the explosion of on-device language translation, there’s a lot of smart stuff happening to make it possible, but the social interaction is a little weird. Either you’re looking at your phone for text to appear, or if you’re on audio-only smart glasses like the Ray-Ban Metas, you’re waiting for the voice to tell you what’s being said.
Snap Specs brings that power of AI and AR together again with its Translation Lens, not just rapidly translating and providing subtitles for whoever is talking, but it pins them to the person who’s talking, too. That could mean multiple people talking could be highlighted in what they’re saying, so you don’t miss a beat of the conversation.
Oh, and shoutout to the visual intelligence around written language translation. This Lens is rapid to use — just pinch and drag over what you want to translate, the Specs take a picture and you rapidly get everything on that document (be it a menu in Mandarin, like in my situation) in English.
The spatial necessities
Then we get to the three elements that really start to make this more of an enticing all-in-one system for any consumer to pick up next year. First, an updated Spectacles Browser — page loading speeds have been sped up considerably, and you are able to pin your browser anywhere you want.
That means you could pop it above the stove with recipe information if you’re cooking. And as Qi Pan, Snapchat Director of Computer Vision, confirmed to me, multiple tab support is in the works. You could have an additional browser window pinned elsewhere with a YouTube video playing. Perfect for my batch cooking while I’m waiting for my food to finish in the oven.
Next is the Gallery Lens. It’s a small addition, but a necessary one to see what you’ve captured, and Snap has really embraced the spatial element of this by allowing you to turn around and see the entire camera roll surrounding you.
Moving on over to the Snapchat Collection. This is easily the biggest introduction to the Snapchat app in a long time, which has seen huge amounts of watch time of content, putting this directly into the Specs makes the world of sense to flick through vertical video and possibly even create first-person content in the future.
They see me synth riding
Finally, I got to try out Synth Riders — a rhythm game that requires you to duck under barriers and hit orbs on time. Think like Beat Saber, but more about pinching rather than slashing.
And beyond having fun in this game, it opened my eyes to a real massive benefit of Snap Specs. A growing category of apps on the Meta Quest 3 and Quest 3S is focused on fitness. To make keeping fit at home fun, these titles can give you a gamified workout, but no matter how many times I try them, it’s just not comfortable to exercise with a whole VR headset on my face.
That changes significantly when all the computation is in something the size of glasses. The fitness opportunity here is huge, whether it’s giving you collectibles on a long walk or something more fixed in place like Synth Riders.
For the record, I managed to get a high score of over 7,000, but the battery went flat just as my playthrough was ending. Yes, I’m a little too competitive at times, and definitely don’t want that being lost to stretching the stamina too thin!
What about the size of them?
Ultimately, this is the biggest obstacle between the likes of Snap and making true smart glasses a reality. These are going to be incredibly visible on your face, so they have to look sleek, stylish and feel comfortable enough to wear all day long.
While talking to Snap, it’s clear this is a challenge — maintaining the same spec list of hardware to fuel all these experiences in Lenses, and massively condensing the size of everything at the same time.
And in my mind, I’ve no doubt that the biggest challenge is probably trying to maintain battery life. Currently, the developer Spectacles provides up to 45 minutes of use on a single charge, and daily demands will require more than this.
But after speaking to the team, it’s clear they’re up to the challenge and there is a plan to get there.
Outlook
As I left the company office, I had to take a hot minute to just take stock of what I’d witnessed. So far, any demo of Snap’s tech has always been with the asterisk of it being a developer project. It’s cool and all, but it is housed in a giant pair of glasses and is purely a proof of concept of what is truly possible when AR and AI come together.
Now, I’ve seen what this could really mean to any consumer who may buy the upcoming Snap Specs with Snap OS 2.0, and it’s a mighty impressive vision for how we understand the world without us sans smartphone.
We’re still set for a 2026 launch of Snap Specs, and I can’t wait.
Follow Tom’s Guide on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our up-to-date news, analysis, and reviews in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button!
