How much would you pay for a computer on your face?

AR glasses — much more complex than embedding cameras, mics, and speakers into glasses frames — have become something of a white whale for the tech industry. Ever since Snap’s 2016 Spectacles, which only captured photo and video content to share on Snapchat and failed to sell, co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel has been promising investors that Snap would one day revolutionize personal tech devices via a decade’s investment into “wearable computers” that combine AI and AR in a single pair of smart glasses. This week, the result was unveiled: the new Specs glasses are here, and they cost $2,195 a pop.

Beyond smart glasses, Specs represent a “new era of computing” that aims to replace the screens that take us out of our environment with glasses “designed to bring computing into it”, Spiegel said in a note accompanying the news.

While it currently seems utopian, the co-founder’s vision extends to the rest of Silicon Valley, as more tech CEOs bet on a future where smart glasses will become as vital as smartphones are today. But in a world where consumers’ most expensive and currently necessary tech purchases — smartphones and laptops — sit at a similar price point, does a couple thousand dollars position these glasses as more of a luxury?

When asked what’s behind the pricing, Snap’s Specs creative studio lead Ben Feuerstein is doubling down on the novelty of the tech. “The important thing is Specs are a different category of product,” Feuerstein tells Vogue Business. “They’re not camera glasses or a phone accessory. They’re a computer built into a lightweight pair of glasses.” He adds that “the price reflects the capabilities of the product and the fact that we’re introducing a new computing platform.”

If Snap can scale the tech, Feuerstein says there’s a chance this price will come down over time, but for now, Snap is “still early in that journey” and the priority is “getting the technology into people’s hands”. This means Specs are a much bigger ticket purchase than Meta’s, which could narrow down the consumer base able to experiment with the former’s tech.

Doing so is a tall order. Although Big Tech CEOs share a vision that smart glasses represent the future of personal computing and will eclipse smartphones, consumer adoption remains low at around 0.1% of the global population. What’s more, the total addressable market is naturally smaller — 60% of the global population currently wear ordinary glasses to start with.

Combining AI and AR elements, Snap’s new Specs form something of a middle ground between Meta’s $799 Ray-Ban Display AI glasses and Apple’s $3,499 Vision Pro 2 headset. Meta released its display AI glasses last September, a heavier and more expensive version of its Meta Ray-Ban AI smart glasses that have a small in-built display on one lens, which is considered more a HUD Display (head-up display) product, rather than a full AR experience. Much like Snap’s new Specs, these enable real-time directions and translation superimposed on the wearer’s lens, but require the wearer to don a wristband in order to navigate around the in-lens display screen, which is a much smaller HUD display.

Meta’s Ray-Ban Display glasses enable wearers to navigate in real-time and look up information with a small in-built display in one lens. Photos: Courtesy of Meta

But unlike a smartphone, which can be slipped discreetly into a pocket, face-worn technology demands a much higher level of consumer buy-in — one that hinges on genuine utility and a design that’s desirable enough to be worn every day. Do consumers actually want a computer on their face, and will they be willing to pay $2,000 to find out?

In Spiegel’s view, Snap’s new Specs are “the most capable and most wearable AR glasses ever built”. His team has spent the last decade developing the tech behind the glasses, which includes developer tools, a proprietary operating system, displays, optics, and computer vision. The result is a pair of glasses that are geared toward augmented reality that’s useful for the everyday, via a large private display that can overlay directions, spatial measurements, and contextual AI assistance onto both lenses.

Wearers will also be able to stream content, cast a screen, open a whiteboard, turn their screen into a workplace and play games, as well as capture photo and video content with the glasses’ in-built camera. They have a four-hour battery life, weigh around 136g (that’s about 2x Meta’s Ray-Ban Display glasses), a large 51-degree AR field of view across both lenses, as well as the ability to track the wearer’s hand movements without the need for a wristband or separate accessory. Snap has also spent the last year and a half releasing updates to its Snap operating system to enable developers to design and publish their own lenses for Specs in its Lens Studio — the social and “shareable” element that builds on Snap’s Snapchat legacy.

Kaia Gerber is one of Snap’s chosen “creative visionaries” for the launch of its Specs AR glasses. Photography by Steven Meisel

Until now, the augmented reality sector has been dominated by gaming-focused applications, with relatively few use cases breaking into mainstream daily life. But Snap’s core messaging around the new Specs highlights their convergence of AR and AI for everyday utility. “Snap’s thesis is that the smartphone has created a generation of people who are physically present but mentally elsewhere,” says Charles DuManoir, founder of London-based investment and consultancy firm Desygn Capital. “They’re betting that AR glasses represent a chance to close the gap between digital and physical life, rather than forcing a choice between them.”

Unlike Meta and Google, Snap has chosen to design its new smart glasses in-house, which Feuerstein says allows his team to hone every detail like comfort, weight, battery life, and visual quality all in one. Snap’s Specs announcement was accompanied by a global campaign shot by fashion photographer Steven Meisel, featuring a group of celebrity “creative visionaries” such as Kaia Gerber, Jimmy Butler, Imogen Heap, Jung Hoyeon, and Jack Harlow — partners that Snap chose for their “thoughtful point of view on culture, creativity, and self-expression” and who align with Snap’s vision for Specs to become part of everyday life, Feuerstein explains.

Although Snap has not yet disclosed the specific apps or features that wearers can access via their Specs, the new Specs.com site features examples of real-time translations, directions, and hands-free calls overlaid across the lenses. Unlike Snap’s OG smart glasses and Meta’s Ray-Ban AI glasses, the focus is less on content capture and more on real-time everyday assistance.

“With Specs, AI is not intelligence trapped in a chatbox,” Spiegel said in a note announcing the product. “It is intelligence that can see what you see, understand what you’re trying to do, and help you in the moment.” It comes at a time when consumers are growing wary of smartphones and their addictive applications, and paying significant money for devices and offline initiatives that help limit their screen time. But there’s little evidence to suggest that consumers will warm to a new device that brings all these applications even closer to their faces.

Meta’s Ray-Ban Display AI glasses are smaller and lighter than Snap’s new specs, more closely resembling ordinary Ray-Ban glasses. Snap has also followed Meta’s lead with an LED light that indicates when the wearer is recording in the glasses’ in-built camera — a feature that wearers will likely be able to easily circumvent as they have with Meta’s, causing privacy concerns among those in the wearer’s vicinity. Snap says that its new Specs process data on-device, and that wearers will be able to control what gets stored, synced, shared, or deleted.

By including a larger AR display and more immersive features, Snap’s Specs integrate some elements of Apple’s Vision Pro headset into a much smaller product. Where Apple’s headsets impressed the market with their computing power, they’ve failed to take off among consumers, largely due to their bulky design, 650g weight, and inaccessible price. Their design also creates a significant physical barrier between the wearer and others in their surroundings — something that Snap is managing to combat by disguising its AR technology within a relatively appealing frame size.

Last month, Google revealed the first two designs of its AI smart glasses, which are due to release this fall. Combining Google’s Gemini AI model with Samsung’s hardware engineering and Gentle Monster and Warby Parker’s eyewear designs, they’re a direct rival to Meta’s Ray-Ban AI smart glasses, with in-built speakers, cameras, and microphones, so wearers can look up information, make calls, take photos, and get live translations and directions on demand. Just like Snap, both Google and Meta have pitched their smart glasses to consumers as providing everyday assistance that enables the wearer to access convenient information without taking them out of their environment.