The new product was presented by the company’s founder and CEO. Evan Spiegel to the Snap Partner Summit 2024 in Santa Monica, California.
Snap’s announcement of the next generation of Spectacles comes days before rival Meta is likely to unveil its Augmented reality glasses at the Meta Connect conference by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
According to tech news publication The Verge, Apple Inc.’s Sept. 9 announcement of the “Visual Intelligence” feature, which allows users to scan and search for objects around them via the iPhone camera, also sets the stage for the company’s AR glasses, which have reportedly been in development.
Additionally, chipmaker Qualcomm has also been working with Samsung and Google to develop mixed reality glasses.
The push toward AR devices that incorporate digital overlays on physical equipment comes as global technology companies look to devices that will eventually replace smartphones.
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Earlier this month, research firm IDC noted that global shipments of augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR) headsets are expected to grow 41.4% in 2025, led by more affordable devices and the addition of artificial intelligence (AI) features. To be sure, Snap’s Spectacles, which first launched in 2021, have only been made available to developers, and no plans have been published for general availability of the product.
The fifth generation of Spectacles is available to developers for a fee of $99 per month and a minimum one-year commitment.
The device is powered by a dual system-on-a-chip architecture and two Qualcomm Snapdragon processors: the infrastructure divides the workload between the two processors.
“Our design enables more immersive experiences while reducing power consumption and works in conjunction with titanium vapor chambers to improve heat dissipation. Spectacles offer up to 45 minutes of continuous battery life,” the company said in a statement.
In a memo to an employee posted on Snap’s website on Sept. 3, Spiegel had explained the rationale behind the company’s investment in research and development (R&D) for AR glasses.
“Despite our extraordinary efforts to improve the smartphones we use every day by introducing vertical video, ephemeral messaging, Stories, Lenses and more, we continue to struggle with the limitations of screens,” he wrote.
“Smartphone screens distract us from the real world, force us to use small touchscreens to express ourselves, and are not designed to be shared with friends. That’s why we’ve been working on creating augmented reality glasses for over a decade. Billions of people already wear glasses that allow us to interact with the real world through transparent lenses,” Spiegel added.
Snap’s heavy investment in AR glasses is also an attempt by the company to grab a slice of the advertising market, which it admits it was a latecomer to.
“Today, the market for augmented reality glasses is in its infancy. As we continue to differentiate ourselves and gain market share in the highly competitive digital advertising market, we are investing in creating augmented reality glasses that enable people to interact with computing, the world and each other in entirely new ways,” Spiegel wrote in the memo.
“Unlike digital advertising, where we entered late into a market with established, large-scale players, we are a market leader in this new type of glasses and in the development of our augmented reality platform that is already used by hundreds of thousands of developers and hundreds of millions of Snapchat users,” he added.
(The correspondent is in Santa Monica, California, invited by Snap)
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