Snap unveiled its augmented reality glasses, called Specs, on Wednesday, Sept. 16 in a widely broadcast keynote. It was presented by the Snap CEO, Evan Spiegel and I talked to him separately about the launch.

Spiegel is a keen evangelist for the product: almost casual in his description of how the glasses work, which makes them seem real and present, but also passionate, to the point of excitability, about what they mean.

Specs have AR display capabilities, so you can see a map when it’s giving you directions, play translated text in front of your eyes when someone’s talking to you in a foreign language or work as a computer browser with a Bluetooth keyboard. But, I wondered, would people find the new glasses hard to use?

“I think what’s been most exciting and surprising to me is that because the interface is so reliant on your natural gestures, people pick it up incredibly quickly. There’s no real calibration step. You don’t have to go look at a bunch of dots or anything. You can just put Specs on and get started. We found that anchoring the home in the palm of your hand is really helpful because it gives you a defined place to start. So as soon as people see the home on their hand, they learn that just tapping it opens up windows. They can pinch to select whatever they’d like. Then I think folks are off to the races.”

The Home he refers to is a triangle of small circular lights which seem to appear in the palm of your hand, and from which other features emerge. This system avoids the metaphors of keyboards, mice and so on, which Spiegel described as a clunky way of interfacing with computers.

A New Paradigm For Spatial Computing

As we talked, the clearer it became that there was a problem he was actually excited about. It wasn’t how to make Snap’s new Specs smaller, lighter or more fashionable — although he said these things could happen over time. It was something more fundamental: how to persuade people to discover what a new kind of computer can actually do.

“I think this is one of the problems I’m most excited about,” Spiegel said. “I think this is such a fun problem.”

Spiegel does not want people to think of Specs primarily as glasses with cameras, or even as glasses with AI. His ambition sees Specs as a computer. “They’re used for so much more than just taking a photo or a video,” he said.

Distinctive Design And Privacy Controls

The design of the glasses is strikingly distinctive, with an almost futuristic appearance, but Spiegel argued that this design made it immediately apparent that the wearer is using something different.

“I think with Specs, you can see them coming and you really understand the capability of Specs, that they’re not for recording videos, they’re for watching videos or improving your golf swing or playing a game of dominoes with your kids,” he said, “I think that starts to change people’s understanding of what Specs are and what they do.”

That said, they are also capable of shooting video and taking photos. But the design is also part of Snap’s answer to one of the biggest objections surrounding camera-equipped glasses: the fear of covert photography and recording.

Spiegel believes making Specs obviously different helps establish trust. “You’re certainly not going to sneak up on anybody in a pair of Specs,” he said. “I think that’s important because it addresses the concern about covert filming.”

Snap took a similar approach with its original Spectacles, which had a large yellow ring around the camera. Spiegel believes that visible design helped people understand what they were looking at.

“People thought it was fun. They recognized that it was a camera,” he says. “Because they didn’t feel like they were being tricked or fooled.”

Without naming rival brands like Meta, he contrasted that with attempts to make camera glasses look indistinguishable from ordinary eyewear. “I think other companies pursued this vision of trying to disguise camera glasses as a pair of regular glasses, and that’s ultimately broken trust with people with that style of smart glasses.”

Even so, the striking appearance could change, which is “definitely something that we’ll consider over time,” he said. Spiegel wants Specs to become “lighter and smaller” but for now, the priority is capability,“rather than the form factor,” he said.

Real-World Uses For Snap Specs

The idea is to make Specs useful in situations where a conventional computer or smartphone is less convenient or impossible. Spiegel points to watching a virtual screen while travelling, improving a golf swing or allowing a wearer to work as a field technician, hands-free. “That’s a reason to wear Specs,” he explained.

“If Specs can help you get better at your golf swing, I think you’ll try it,” he says. “Or if Specs can allow you to watch a film on what looks like an 115-inch screen while you’re mid-flight, people will wear Specs because that’s really meaningful and valuable to them.”

Spiegel knows that a gadget costing more than $2,000 needs to offer considerably more than a handful of capabilities, some of which are somewhat niche, even though demonstrations of them looked impressive. The answer, he believes, is to create a platform on which developers can build experiences that Snap itself has not imagined.

Unlocking Developer Innovation With Lens Studio

“We’ve already had hundreds of thousands of developers build with Lens Studio, with millions of lenses,” he said — lenses is the word Snap uses for apps. “Now we’re bringing that capability of building immersive AR experiences for Specs.”

“And I think perhaps what I’m actually most excited about overall in launching Specs,” he went on, “is just seeing the incredible things that people build.”

“Developers can leverage Lens Studio through their own agentic coding tools,” he said, “and use that to build almost anything you can imagine really quickly and see it real in the world.”

The hope is that an expanding library of experiences will solve a problem that I was concerned about: how do people discover what they can do with Specs?

Spiegel acknowledged that people will not necessarily know what to ask Specs to do when they first put them on. But strong interests can lead to discovery.

He gave interior designers as an example. They could lay out a home with a client while using Specs, and the same approach could work with golfers, he said. “We can take Specs as a solution to golfers, show them how Specs can help them improve their swing, and then ultimately grow through these different use cases over time.”

Shared AR Experiences And The Future

I asked Spiegel what his own favourite thing about Specs is. “My absolute favorite thing Specs can do are shared experiences,” he said.

“To me, that’s the aha moment because no one’s experienced anything like that in computing before. I think everything that I experienced from growing up and using a computer, that entire paradigm of what computing is changes with Specs because you can share experiences together. And I think the reason why that’s meaningful is people really like to connect through activities,” he enthused.

“I think Specs has an opportunity to help create more points of connection for people to actually do things together, enjoy the world together, and socialize together,” he added.

He remembered a solar-system lens allowed him to pass a virtual planet to another person. “I remember that feeling of handing it to someone and being like, ‘Oh my goodness, my entire construct for what a computer is has changed because it’s now something I can share with people.’”

As the hardware evolves the more important evolution may be the experiences people create around it.

“Every day it feels like someone’s made a new lens that I never in a million years would have thought of,” Spiegel said. “It’s really cool.”