Evan Spiegel says Snap can’t fulfill its mission without its new AR glasses

Snap’s cofounder and CEO, Evan Spiegel, gave this morning’s keynote at AWE, the augmented reality industry’s big annual conference. He came with news: Snap, best known for its Snapchat ephemeral messaging app, is releasing a pair of AR-enabled glasses called Specs. It intends to ship them this fall for $2,195, and is taking preorders. Though Specs are new, Snap’s investment in smart glasses as a computing and communications platform is anything but. Depending on how you figure, it all began nearly a decade ago, when the company shipped its first product in the category, which, like four subsequent versions, was known as Spectacles. Or back in 2014, when it acquired a tiny startup called Vergence Labs that had already crowdfunded and shipped a product called Epiphany Eyewear. Spiegel pinpoints an even earlier origin story. As a Stanford student, he told me this week, “I had seen prototypes of AR headsets that really looked like giant helmets, essentially. The promise of being able to actually use computing through a see-through lens rather than a screen was really exciting and interesting to me.” Though not exactly svelte, Specs are less extravagantly chunky than previous Snap AR glasses. [Photo: Courtesy of Snap] His enduring interest in AR has kept the glasses project going through some turbulent years at Snap, whose stock is down more than 90% from its peak. The company announced major rounds of layoffs in August 2022, February 2024, and last April. Along the way, it shed several noncore activities, including ones involving original short shows, social mapping, music creation, a selfie drone, and enterprise services. Why has Snap stuck with glasses for so long, rather than finding them a distraction from its primary business of keeping nearly a billion Snapchatters happy and monetizing their attention through advertising? Spiegel argues that they’ve never been a mere side project. “If you look at the history of the company, we’ve been laser focused on