I have covered smart glasses for years, tried the new Snap Specs, and have spoken to the CEO, Evan Spiegel. Here are my thoughts on where they fit in the market.

Let's start with their look. Compared to smart glasses like the Meta Ray-Bans, the Even Reality G2s, or any everyday glasses, there is no denying they look significantly more chunky. However, none of the glasses we just mentioned are true AR glasses, in which virtual objects are anchored to your physical environment. That's reserved for full-on headsets.

So now let's compare the look of Specs to the Apple Vision Pro, the Meta Quest, or the Samsung Galaxy XR. The Specs are much less restrictive and more comfortable than those, especially considering there is no tethered battery pack or puck.

Even the Meta Ray-Ban Displays, which do have waveguide displays that project color directly into the lens and weigh half as much as Specs, only offer one-dimensional graphics, giving you visual aids but not the same AR experiences that Specs promises, such as a 115-inch cinema screen or a 24-inch monitor placed into your environment.

Now, in terms of weight, at 132 to 136 grams, they are not meant to be worn all day, unlike smart glasses. Rather, they are supposed to be session-based: you use them for work, to watch a movie, or on a plane, and then you take them off. For context, other headsets like the Apple Vision Pro weigh closer to 600 grams and have the same utility.

That leads me to my next point: price. At $2,195, they are obviously not meant for everyone, as those other headsets are not either. When I spoke to Evan about the price point, he gave me the same response I got from Samsung when I asked about their headset release last fall. This is meant for "early adopters," meaning developers building apps for it, or people who love the idea so much that they're willing to pay a premium.

So, should regular consumers pre-order them? Probably not, unless you are one of those people. In the future, I'm sure they will get lighter, look sleeker, and hopefully become cheaper, but what makes them impressive right now is that, in the current market for what they offer, they are leading the space, if they can deliver on their promises.

For instance, at the same event, Google launched the XREAL Aura glasses, which serve the exact same purpose as the Specs, but they also look a bit strange thanks to their birdbath display tech and bulky battery-and-processor attachment. Also, the price of these has not even been revealed.

Our Deeper View

Ultimately, it is really cool that Snap has crammed so much power into a footprint even close to that of normal glasses. Are we at a point for mass adoption? Absolutely not, but it's an important first step. For AI aficionados, this could also be a win for you, as there could be a future in which glasses provide AI assistance overlaid onto your actual environment with spatial awareness. That could be very powerful and useful. So for now, it's best to think of Snap Specs not as a more powerful pair of Meta Ray-Bans, but as an impressively smaller and less expensive version of Apple Vision Pro, and an interesting step toward the AR glasses of the future that could replace our smartphones.

Disclosure: Sabrina Ortiz's travel to Augmented World Expo was paid for by Snap. The Deep View's coverage is editorially independent from the companies we cover.