Snap unveils £1,995 smart glasses after previous flops

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Snapchat's parent company has announced it is releasing new smart glasses, a decade after its original pair lost the company tens of millions of dollars.

The new augmented reality (AR) glasses, called Specs, will allow users to see digital elements overlaid onto the world. They will cost £1,995 in the UK and $2,195 in the US when shipping begins this autumn.

That makes them cheaper than Apple's Vision Pro mixed-reality headset and its $3,499 starting price, but far more than Meta's smart glasses, which start at $224.

Evan Spiegel, co-founder and chief executive of Snap Inc, said the glasses marked the "beginning of a new era in computing".

Ben Hatton, a market analyst at FDM CCS Insight, said the price tag meant the technology was "unlikely to become a mainstream device any time soon".

Snap's core audience of younger consumers "rarely have this sort of money to spend on a single gadget," he said.

A $200 refundable deposit is needed to pre-order the glasses, which will ship in the US, the UK, and France.

Snap says they are designed to be "wearable for everyday life," though the battery lasts four hours on average before needing charging again. A charging case holds up to 20 hours of battery life.

Unlike Meta's Ray-Ban and Oakley models, the glasses function without needing a "tether" to a smartphone.

And they differ from Apple Vision Pro - which is mainly designed for use at home - as they do not require a wire connected to a "puck", or battery pack.

Hatton said while this improved "wearability and mobility" for the user, it came "at the cost of lower battery output".

"Despite the impressive features and experiences available through Specs, glasses with a 4-hour mixed-use battery life and bulky design are not going to replace the smartphone any time soon," he said.

Users will be able to use the glasses' AI assistant to complete tasks such as getting directions or asking questions about objects they are looking at.

They will also be able to watch videos, browse the web, play AR games and record what they see through the glasses.

Snap

Smart glasses have been criticised for a lack of privacy, having been used to film women in public without their consent.

In February, UK data privacy watchdog the ICO wrote to Meta, after revelations data workers in Kenya had to watch videos of people having sex and using the toilet which were filmed with Meta's smart glasses.

"Privacy has to be built in from the very beginning," Spiegel said, adding: "Specs only work if people trust them".

A built-in light will glow when the device is recording, with Snap stating users will be given control over what data gets stored, synced, shared, or deleted.

Snap Inc shares fell by some 9% after the announcement at the Augmented World Expo conference in California on Tuesday.

Another go from Snap

This is not the first attempt at smart glasses for Snap.

In 2016 it launched Spectacles, camera-equipped sunglasses which cost £129 and could record short video clips of up to 10 seconds.

In 2017 the company revealed losses of $40m (£30m at the time) due to "excess inventory" of the glasses and cancelled orders.

Updated versions of Spectacles were released in both 2018 and 2019 with a higher price tag (£330 for the third instalment) and upgrades including a better camera resolution.

It has not released a widely available consumer product since then.

Snap later began shifting towards AR, offering new Spectacles in 2021 to a "select group of global creators" in the field.

In May, Google announced it would launch its own pair of smart glasses a decade on from the doomed Google Glass, which had been pulled after backlash on price and privacy concerns.

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