Snap’s Specs AR glasses show promise but feel unfinished

The Verge’s Jay Peters tested Snap’s Specs, the company’s first augmented reality glasses intended for consumers, and found an ambitious product that still felt unreliable.

Peters’ favorite demonstration was a shared dominoes game. He could select a virtual domino with a pinch and place it on a real table while sitting across from a Snap employee wearing another pair. Snap has spent more than half a decade developing the technology and has produced two generations of glasses that shipped only to a small number of developers. The company plans to launch the Specs for consumers sometime this fall at $2,195.

The black glasses come in two lens sizes, 47mm and 52mm. Their chunky design houses the hardware needed to operate as a standalone computer, without a phone, compute puck, or external battery. They felt sturdy and stayed in place during walking, but Peters could not determine whether they would become uncomfortable during a full four-hour battery cycle.

The glasses overlay menus, app windows, and digital objects on the user’s view through waveguide displays capable of showing “16 million colors.” Hand tracking enables pinching and dragging, but the controls were often finicky. Bright sunlight made the graphics harder to see, while the 51-degree field of view caused digital elements to slip out of sight. The dedicated AI chatbot assistant was also slow and inconsistent in limited testing, leaving Peters skeptical that the Specs are ready for primetime.