Snapchat Made AR Glasses Chic – and Got Kaia Gerber to Prove It

Snap Inc. (yes, aka Snapchat’s parent company) has unveiled SPECS: a wearable computer built into a pair of see-through augmented reality glasses.

They went up for pre-order this week at specs.com for £1,995 – with a refundable deposit to hold your place – and are expected to ship this autumn in the UK, US and France. Which means, in theory, you could be wearing a 115-inch cinema on your nose by the time the clocks go back.

Bold? Wildly so. But Snap has been building towards this for more than a decade, filing over 7,000 patents across displays, optics, computer vision and its own operating system. So before you roll your eyes at “glasses that cost more than a fortnight in Antiparos,” it’s worth hearing them out.

 

“A new era in computing” – or a very novel way to stop doomscrolling

The thesis, from co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel, is grand. “SPECS are the beginning of a new era in computing,” he said at the launch. “For decades, computers have asked us to look down, sit still, or step out of the moment. SPECS bring computing into the world around us where we live, work, learn, create, and connect.”

There’s a neat little line that sums up the whole pitch: “The smartphone put our lives in our pockets,” Spiegel said. “SPECS put computing into the world, where life actually happens.”

 

 

Translation for the rest of us: less hunching over a phone at dinner, more being present – albeit with a private screen floating somewhere above your prosecco. Make of that what you will.

The actual specs on the SPECS

Forgive us, the pun was unavoidable. Here’s what you’re paying for…

They’re light. Crafted from high-performance Swiss TR90 polymer, the 47mm model weighs just 132 grams, the 52mm version 136 grams – and removable inserts mean they’ll take a prescription. The display is Snap’s own liquid crystal on silicon technology, with a 51-degree field of view and 16 million colours. Practically, that’s the equivalent of a 24-inch desktop monitor when you’re working, or a 115-inch home cinema screen when you’re streaming. On your face. In a café.

 

The detail that genuinely charmed us: the electrochromic lenses, which shift from clear to tinted in 10 seconds, were inspired by the same technology used in Boeing 787 Dreamliner windows. Two Snapdragon processors do the heavy lifting – one for computer vision, one dedicated to running Snap’s “Lenses” – delivering a barely-there 7-millisecond motion-to-photon latency, which is the bit that stops digital content sliding around like a dodgy AirDrop.

 

Battery is the catch, as ever. You get up to four hours of mixed use, with the charging case providing four more charges for up to 20 hours total. Which is to say: very much a day bag accessory, not a forget-about-it one.

The fashion of it all

Here’s where The Modems sits up. The global SPECS campaign was shot by Steven Meisel – the Steven Meisel, the man behind some of the most defining fashion imagery of the last forty years – and features a cast Snap is calling “Visionaries”: Kaia Gerber, Hoyeon, Jack Harlow, Imogen Heap and Jimmy Butler, each developing their own SPECS experiences to debut later this year.

 

 

This is the part worth clocking. AR has, until now, been sold to us like a gadget – all spec sheets and stage demos. Putting it in front of Meisel’s lens, styled like a fashion launch rather than a tech drop, is a deliberate and clever pivot.

Whether wearable computing actually becomes chic is another question. But this is the first time anyone’s seriously made it so.

On AI, and on trust

Snap is keen to stress this isn’t another chatbot. “With SPECS, AI is not intelligence trapped in a chat box,” Spiegel said. “It is intelligence that can see what you see, understand what you’re trying to do, and help you in the moment.”

 

 

In practice that means directions, spatial measurements and contextual assistance appearing exactly when you need them – plus hundreds of developer-built Lenses, from golf guidance to immersive history.

Which brings us, inevitably, to privacy. Glasses that see what you see are a different proposition to a phone in your pocket, and Snap knows it. The company says SPECS ask before accessing sensitive information, include an LED that glows when recording, prioritise on-device processing, and let you control what’s stored, synced, shared or deleted.

“SPECS only work if people trust them,” Spiegel explains, “Privacy has to be built in from the very beginning.” Noted. We’ll be watching how that holds up in the wild.

So – would you?

We’re genuinely undecided, and think that’s the honest place to land. As Spiegel puts it, “SPECS are not designed to replace the world. They’re designed to bring computing into it.” Snap is betting big – he’s already called them “the most capable and most wearable glasses ever built” – and signed off the launch with a flourish, “Together, we will create something truly special. A future where computing empowers us, brings us closer together, and reconnects us with the world around us.”

 

 

A lovely sentiment. Also nearly two grand, but if they can deliver what they promise the future, it seems, is looking up – we’ll find out this autumn whether we’re ready to look up and through it.