Snap Specs

Snap Specs
Basic Info
VR/AR	Augmented Reality
Type	AR Glasses
Subtype	Standalone AR
Platform	Snap OS
Developer	Snap Inc.
Manufacturer	Snap Inc.
Announcement Date	June 16, 2026 (Augmented World Expo 2026); full launch event September 16, 2026
Release Date	Fall 2026 (expected shipping; pre-orders open since June 16, 2026)
Price	$2,195 ($200 refundable deposit); $2,395 as the Connected Case bundle with the cellular charging case (United States)
Website	https://www.specs.com/
Versions	Two sizes: Narrow Fit (47 mm), Wide Fit (52 mm); Wi-Fi only or Wi-Fi + Cellular (with the cellular charging case)
Requires	Fully standalone (no phone or external puck)
Predecessor	Snap Spectacles 5
System
Operating System	Snap OS
Chipset	Two Qualcomm Snapdragon processors
CPU	Dual Snapdragon (one for Lenses and apps, one for computer vision)
GPU	Integrated
Storage
Storage	Not disclosed
Memory	Not disclosed
SD Card Slot	No
Display
Display	Stereo see-through waveguide fed by LCoS micro-projectors
Resolution	Not disclosed
Image
Field of View	51° diagonal
Optics
Optics	LCoS projectors with waveguides; electrochromic tinting lenses; 16 million colors
Ocularity	Binocular
Adjustable Diopter	Removable prescription inserts (custom single-vision, -8 to +2 diopters, from a third-party partner)
Passthrough	Optical see-through (true AR)
Tracking
Tracking	6DoF inside-out with hand tracking
Base Stations	No (inside-out tracking)
Eye Tracking	No
Face Tracking	No
Hand Tracking	Yes
Body Tracking	No
Rotational Tracking	Yes
Positional Tracking	Yes
Latency	7 millisecond motion-to-photon
Audio
Audio	Stereo speakers with spatial audio (open-ear, in the temples)
Microphone	6 high-SNR MEMS microphones in the temples
3.5mm Audio Jack	No
Camera	2 full-color cameras, 2 infrared computer-vision cameras
Connectivity
Connectivity	Wi-Fi, Bluetooth; optional cellular through a 5G-capable charging case
Ports	Magnetic 5-pin interface (charging cable or USB-C streaming cable)
Wired Video	Yes, USB-C streaming cable to a PC, phone or game console
WiFi	Yes
Bluetooth	Yes
Power	Internal battery with charging case
Battery Life	Up to 4 hours mixed use (about 20 hours with charging case)
Device
Weight	132 g (47 mm) / 136 g (52 mm)
Material	Swiss TR90 polymer
Headstrap	Temple arms (glasses style)
Haptics	No
Sensors	2 full-color cameras, 2 infrared cameras, 6-axis IMUs
Input	Hand gestures, voice

Snap Specs, marketed simply as Specs, are standalone augmented reality glasses developed by Snap Inc. The company announced them on June 16, 2026, at Augmented World Expo 2026, with CEO Evan Spiegel presenting on stage. Specs are Snap's first AR glasses sold directly to the public. They are priced at $2,195 and scheduled to ship in the fall of 2026 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France.

The product is the consumer follow-up to the fifth-generation Spectacles, the developer-only AR glasses Snap released in 2024. Press coverage often describes Specs as the sixth generation of the Spectacles line, though Snap dropped the Spectacles name for the consumer launch and markets the device as a "see-through computer" rather than a camera or a pair of AI glasses.

Specs run Snap OS and third-party apps called Lenses, built with Lens Studio. The consumer model weighs about 132 grams, roughly 40 percent less than the 226-gram developer Spectacles.

Snap held a full launch event for Specs in Los Angeles on September 16, 2026. There it introduced SPECS Intelligence, an AI service that works across the glasses, iPhone and Mac, along with an optional charging case with cellular connectivity (also sold in a US$2,395 bundle with the glasses), carrier partners in all three launch markets, and a slate of partner Lenses. As of late September 2026, the glasses were available for pre-order but had not shipped, and Snap had not given an exact shipping date.

Reviewed 29 September 2026. Launch event date and place, prices and Connected Case bundle, carriers and data plans, ordering terms, availability status, SPECS Intelligence, launch Lenses, hardware details added from specs.com and Snap's newsroom, and the Engadget, Gizmodo and UploadVR hands-on attributions, each against its cited source. About review dates.

Announcement and availability

Spiegel introduced Specs during Augmented World Expo (AWE) 2026. Pre-orders opened the same day at specs.com, with a $200 refundable deposit reserving a unit and the remaining $1,995 due when the glasses ship. Snap set availability for the fall of 2026 in three launch markets: the United States, the United Kingdom, and France.

Snap had previewed the consumer launch a year earlier, in June 2025, when it first said the product would be called Specs and would arrive in 2026. The 2026 event confirmed the price, the design, and the ship window. In the June 10, 2025 announcement, Snap said it had spent 11 years and more than $3 billion developing the technology behind its AR glasses. In January 2026, Snap moved the Specs effort into a new subsidiary, Specs Inc., which it said would allow "greater operational focus and alignment" as work on the product continued.

Spiegel acknowledged that $2,195 puts Specs out of reach for most buyers and said lowering the price over time is a priority: "something we're really focused on over time, because we want Specs to be as accessible as possible."

September 2026 launch event

Snap livestreamed the September 16, 2026 event in Los Angeles, where Spiegel gave the first in-depth look at the software and services around the glasses. Snap announced a SPECS Charging Case with Cellular, which holds four additional charges for the glasses and adds cellular data. Snap says the case is sold separately, but it has not published a standalone price; with the glasses, it is sold as the SPECS Connected Case bundle for $2,395, $200 more than the glasses alone. Snap's product page describes the two options as Wi-Fi or "Wi-Fi + Cellular with a 5G-capable charging case".

Snap named one carrier partner per launch market: Verizon in the United States, EE in the United Kingdom and Orange in France. Verizon offers data plans from $10 a month for its own customers and from $20 a month for others, a 36-month payment plan for eligible customers, and hands-on demonstrations in select stores. Regional pricing for the UK and France was not published at the event.

Snap also announced a SPECS First Look pop-up at Westfield Century City in Los Angeles, open from October 1, 2026, where people can try the glasses in a guided demonstration. Although the event was presented as a launch, UploadVR noted that there was still no concrete shipping date for the glasses.

Ordering terms

Snap's store lists Specs as "expected to ship starting Fall 2026". Buyers can reserve up to five units, choosing a frame size and paying the refundable deposit; Snap states that the deposit is not an order confirmation and that customers will be asked to pay the balance closer to the shipping window. Pre-orders can be cancelled for a full refund of the deposit before the order ships. Snap offers free shipping and returns, a 14-day return period and a one-year limited warranty. Financing through Klarna is available in select markets; as of September 2026 Snap said it was working to bring Klarna to France and the United Kingdom.

The box contains the glasses, a charging case, a charging cable, a cleaning cloth, a quick-start guide and a nose pad kit. Snap recommends a Virtual Try-On on a supported iPhone (iPhone XS or later) before ordering to choose between the two frame sizes.

Design and build

Specs use frames made from Swiss TR90 polymer, a lightweight thermoplastic Snap chose for durability and weight. They come in two sizes: a 47-millimeter frame that weighs 132 grams and a 52-millimeter frame that weighs 136 grams. Both are far lighter than the fifth-generation developer Spectacles, which weighed 226 grams. Snap calls the two sizes Narrow Fit (47 mm) and Wide Fit (52 mm), and ships them with swappable sizing nose pads.

The lenses are electrochromic. Snap says they use the same kind of technology as the windows of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, and their tint shifts from clear to dark in about 10 seconds, so the same pair works indoors and outdoors. Wearers who need vision correction can drop in removable prescription inserts and swap them as needed. According to Snap, the inserts are custom-made single-vision lenses for prescriptions from -8 to +2 diopters, produced by a third-party partner and shipped separately from the glasses.

Display and optics

Specs project images with liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS) micro-projectors that feed a stereo see-through waveguide, so digital content appears overlaid on the real world rather than on an opaque screen. Snap developed the displays in-house and rates them at 16 million colors with a 51-degree diagonal field of view. Snap says the waveguide uses billions of nanostructures, small enough that more than 10,000 fit on the tip of a single hair.

Snap describes the virtual image as comparable to a 24-inch desktop monitor for work, or a 115-inch screen viewed from about 10 feet for watching video. The system targets a 7-millisecond motion-to-photon latency, the delay between head movement and the display updating, which Snap says keeps overlaid graphics locked in place as the wearer moves.

Snap has not published the display resolution, brightness or refresh rate. At the June announcement, Road to VR also listed RAM and storage sizes, camera specifications, wireless standards, a water resistance rating and battery capacity among the details Snap had not disclosed.

Processing and sensors

Two Qualcomm Snapdragon processors run the glasses. Snap splits the workload between them: one chip runs Snap OS, the Lenses, and applications, while the second is dedicated to computer vision tasks such as head-position tracking, hand tracking, environment meshing, and spatial anchoring. Keeping vision processing on its own chip is how Snap reaches the low latency target without a tethered phone or external compute puck.

For sensing the world, Specs carry two full-color high-resolution cameras and two infrared cameras used for computer vision, plus 6-axis inertial measurement units for motion. The result is 6DoF inside-out tracking with hand tracking, so the glasses understand their position in a room and respond to gestures without controllers or base stations. Stereo speakers provide spatial audio and a microphone array handles voice input. Snap's product page specifies the array as six high-SNR MEMS microphones in the temples, next to open-ear stereo speakers. The glasses have no eye tracking.

Battery and charging

Snap rates the built-in battery at up to four hours of mixed use. A charging case holds four additional charges, for about 20 hours of use away from a wall outlet. A custom magnetic charging cable can also top up the glasses while they are being worn, so a wearer can keep using Specs during a charge.

Connectivity

Specs connect over Wi-Fi, or over cellular data when paired with the optional cellular charging case. The glasses support Bluetooth peripherals such as keyboards, and Snap says they can connect wirelessly to a computer to extend its workspace. The magnetic 5-pin interface on the frame takes either the charging cable or a USB-C streaming cable, which lets the glasses act as a large display for a PC, phone or game console.

Snap OS and software

Specs run Snap OS, the operating system Snap built for its AR glasses. Apps take the form of Lenses, sandboxed AR experiences that developers publish to the platform. Snap said it shipped 10 Snap OS updates with more than 40 new features and APIs in the 18 months before the Specs announcement, developing the platform on the installed base of developer Spectacles.

Snap puts on-device AI at the center of the experience. In the company's framing, the assistant is "intelligence that can see what you see, understand what you're trying to do, and help you in the moment." Use cases Snap highlights include real-time translation and navigation, alongside games and creative tools such as the Drum Kit and Vector Fields Lenses it cited as examples.

Lenses shown at launch

At the September 2026 event Snap presented a set of first-party and partner Lenses:

Area	Lenses and partners announced
Communication	Snapchat redesigned for Specs, with a finger snap to take a Snap and hands-free video calling
Translation	Spoken translation shown as captions, supporting 60 languages
Navigation and travel	Directions overlaid on the world with optional voice guidance; Tripadvisor recommendations, review translation and currency conversion
Shopping	Shopify-powered product browsing that places items in a room at full scale
Sports and fitness	NBA and WNBA basketball practice with a real ball and hoop; golf swing and putting analysis developed with guidance from PGA professionals; ALO Wellness Club movement, recovery and mindfulness content (announced for 2027)
Entertainment	A Harry Potter Lens made with HBO Max for the HBO series premiering at Christmas 2026; YouTube and HBO Max streaming in the browser on a virtual 115-inch screen; Spotify; an Apollo 11 mission Lens; Starmap
Shared games	Connected Lenses for dominoes, chess and table tennis
Productivity	A shared whiteboard; wireless connection to a computer; Bluetooth keyboard support

Snap also presented Lenses developed with five public figures it calls visionaries: a Dominoes Lens with basketball player Jimmy Butler that turns a flat surface into a game table, a reading Lens with Kaia Gerber for saving quotes, looking up definitions and annotating physical books, a Meditation Garden Lens with Hoyeon, a streaming experience with Jack Harlow for watching movies and TV on the move, and a Sound Space Lens with Imogen Heap that turns natural movements into sound, with spatial instruments controlled by the hands and voice. During the event, Engadget showed a video call on the glasses filled with Snapchat AR effects. In Engadget's hands-on, the navigation Lens used Mapbox for walking directions. Snap OS on Specs can also anchor a window so that it follows the wearer through a space; Engadget's reviewer wrote that this addressed her earlier frustration with having to look around to find AR content.

SPECS Intelligence

SPECS Intelligence is an AI service Snap announced at the September event. It runs on iPhone, Mac and the glasses, and Snap says it builds an understanding of a user's goals, priorities, relationships and routines from the apps the user chooses to connect, then surfaces information and actions when it expects them to be useful. Snap's product page says it can draft replies, organize details and track progress toward goals, and that it asks for approval before taking action.

From September 16, 2026, anyone 18 or older in the United States could download the SPECS app for iOS and try a preview; a fuller Mac version is invitation-only through a waitlist. Neither requires owning the glasses. UploadVR reported that the iPhone preview only provides "insights" from Gmail and Google Calendar, and that Snap would not say which AI model provider powers the service or what its business model will be after the free preview. Snap states that its staff cannot view the personal content used with the service and that this content is not used to train AI models or for personalized advertising.

Enterprise

For business use, Snap named enterprise partners including Salesforce, Amazon Web Services, NVIDIA, Trifork and Hololight. Snap's support pages direct organizations to a separate enterprise contact channel for purchases.

Developer tools

Alongside the hardware, Snap expanded its developer toolchain. Lens Studio gained an agentic development preview that works through integrations with Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor, letting developers build Lenses with AI coding assistants. Snap also introduced a Native Development Kit for lower-level work, a Specs Spatial Benchmark for measuring spatial performance, and a Migration Agent to help move existing projects onto the platform.

Snap said it filed more than 7,000 patents across its AR stack during the development of Specs.

Privacy

Snap built several privacy controls into Specs. A visible LED shows when the glasses are recording, and Snap prioritizes on-device processing so that data stays on the hardware where possible. Spiegel framed trust as a precondition for the product: "SPECS only work if people trust them. Privacy has to be built in from the very beginning." Snap blocks certain Lens use cases outright, including facial recognition, and moderates submitted Lenses against its guidelines. A toggle in the Specs app lets users, including parents managing a child's device, limit which Lenses can run. Snap's product page adds that users control permissions when third-party Lenses request camera or microphone access together with internet connectivity.

Positioning and reception

Spiegel presented Specs as a step beyond the smartphone rather than an accessory to it. "The smartphone put our lives in our pockets," he said. "SPECS put computing into the world, where life actually happens." He called Specs "the most capable and most wearable AR glasses ever built" and described the category as "a new type of computer, a see-through computer."

He also drew a line between Specs and the camera-first AI glasses sold by rivals. "I think AI glasses are typically being used to record content," Spiegel said. "That's not the purpose of Specs." Snap lists "AI assistance, work tools, entertainment, and shared experiences" as the point of the device, and Spiegel pointed to shared, face-to-face uses, such as sitting across from someone to play, design, or watch something together, as what see-through glasses make possible.

The launch is also a business bet. Snap, whose revenue comes mostly from Snapchat advertising, is investing in AR hardware to diversify its income and to stake a claim in what Spiegel calls a post-smartphone computing platform, competing with Meta, Xreal, and other companies moving into smart glasses.

Hands-on impressions

Snap did not give media demos at the June announcement, according to Road to VR. Hands-on reports from Engadget, Gizmodo and UploadVR followed in September 2026; Engadget's Karissa Bell tried the glasses at Snap's headquarters, and UploadVR's David Heaney at the Los Angeles launch event.

Engadget's Karissa Bell found the glasses chunkier than the bulkiest smart glasses she had reviewed, but wrote that the fit was snug and that they never slipped down her nose. She called the hand-tracking controls, which use pointing with the index finger and pinching with the thumb, intuitive and responsive, and found the display bright and easy to see. She noted that the arms of the glasses were warm to the touch after about 10 minutes and said she likely would not wear them as everyday glasses.

Gizmodo's James Pero found the 51-degree field of view the main limitation. It still felt like a tight window compared with the 110-degree field of view of the Meta Quest 3, and in the Dominoes game and the translation Lens content often drifted out of view. He described the display as not the highest resolution or brightest, but still enough, and visible indoors and outdoors. He found the pinch-and-drag interface similar to Apple Vision Pro but "not nearly as snappy", and the glasses light on his face but less so on his ears.

UploadVR's David Heaney compared the field of view to that of Microsoft HoloLens 2. He reported a rainbow pattern and poor color uniformity across the display area, blue streaks from reflections of real-world light at the edges, and a frame rate that appeared well below the 72 frames per second minimum of other XR systems, and he called the lack of eye tracking a major miss. He praised the computer vision: positional and hand tracking stayed solid in low light and with crowds around, and the glasses performed continuous real-time scene meshing with occlusion, something he noted even Quest 3 does not do.

Comparison with Spectacles 5

Feature	Specs (2026)	Snap Spectacles 5 (2024)
Audience	Consumer (public sale)	Developers only
Price	$2,195 one-time	$99/month, 1-year commitment
Weight	132 g (47 mm) / 136 g (52 mm)	226 g
Field of view	51° diagonal	46° diagonal
Display	In-house LCoS with waveguide, 16M colors	LCoS with waveguide
Latency	7 ms motion-to-photon	13 ms motion-to-photon
Processors	Two Snapdragon (split roles)	Two Snapdragon
Battery	Up to 4 hours (20 hours with case)	About 45 minutes standalone
Lenses	Electrochromic, removable Rx inserts	Auto-tinting, Rx insert
OS	Snap OS	Snap OS

Specifications summary

Specification	Detail
Announced	June 16, 2026 (AWE 2026); full launch event September 16, 2026
Ships	Fall 2026 (US, UK, France); no exact date announced as of September 2026
Price	$2,195 ($200 refundable deposit); $2,395 Connected Case bundle with cellular charging case
Sizes	Narrow Fit (47 mm), Wide Fit (52 mm)
Display	Stereo see-through waveguide, LCoS projectors, 16 million colors
Field of view	51° diagonal
Latency	7 ms motion-to-photon
Processors	Two Qualcomm Snapdragon chips
Cameras	2 full-color, 2 infrared
Sensors	6-axis IMUs
Tracking	6DoF inside-out, hand tracking; no eye tracking
Audio	Stereo speakers, microphone array (6 MEMS microphones)
Connectivity	Wi-Fi, Bluetooth peripherals; cellular with optional 5G-capable charging case
Ports	Magnetic 5-pin interface for charging cable or USB-C streaming cable
Battery	Up to 4 hours mixed use (20 hours with case)
Weight	132 g (47 mm) / 136 g (52 mm)
Material	Swiss TR90 polymer
Lenses	Electrochromic, removable prescription inserts (single vision, -8 to +2 diopters)
OS	Snap OS

See also

• Snap Spectacles 5
• Snap Spectacles
• Snap OS
• Lens Studio
• Snap Inc.
• Augmented Reality
• AR Glasses
• Waveguide Display
• Meta Ray-Ban Display