The Deep View: Conversations

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel joins The Deep View Conversations to discuss SPECS, Snap's long-awaited augmented reality glasses and why he believes they represent a new era of computing.

Senior reporter Sabrina Ortiz interviewed Evan at Augmented World Expo immediately after the SPECS unveiling and Spiegel explained why Snap spent more than a decade building toward this moment, how SPECS differ from AI smart glasses and mixed reality headsets, and why he sees AR glasses as the future beyond smartphones.

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Sabrina Ortiz

Senior Reporter at The Deep View

What is The Deep View: Conversations?

From frontier labs and enterprise platforms to emerging startups reshaping entire industries, The Deep View: Conversations podcast interviews the brightest minds and the most influential leaders in AI.

Sabrina Ortiz: All right, thank you so much, Evan, for joining me this morning. We're here at Augmented World Expo, where we just had a huge announcement for Snap. Finally, specs, which are their consumer pair of glasses, are unveiled. Let's talk about them. How about you give us a bit about what specs are, and why people should care about them?

Evan Spiegel: Well, thanks so much. We've been looking forward to this day for such a long time. It's super exciting. Specs are a new type of computer, and they're built into a see-through pair of glasses that allow you to put computing into the world around you. This is really an expression of our vision and our effort to make computing more human. Because in order to make computing feel human, it has to live in the world with us. It can't just be confined to these little screens that take our attention and distract us from the world around us.

Sabrina Ortiz: I think it's super interesting that within press materials, within the keynote, even now, you're using the term computing instead of just smart glasses or AI glasses. I think that's intentional today. During the keynote, we could insert a clip. They had the funniest X and Y axis, and it was like AI glasses were somewhat capable, but super wearable. Then there was a potato involved. You'll see it. But there's a distinction between specs, and I think because specs are supposed to be a bit different than the rest of the categories, can you explain a bit more about that?

Evan Spiegel: Yeah. Specs are really interesting because they represent a new category of augmented reality glasses. Today in the marketplace, you have devices that are either very wearable, lightweight glasses, but not super capable. They're almost like phone accessories. I kind of think of them in the same category as like AirPods. And then you have headsets like Vision Pro or HoloLens that are really capable, but they're very heavy. They're hard to wear out in the world. Specs are unique because they're both very wearable and extremely capable. So they're capable of all of this incredible spatial computing and bringing computing into the world around you, but they're also comfortable enough to wear. That's really the unique opportunity that we see to bring computing into the world through specs.

Sabrina Ortiz: Can you tell me a bit about the use cases? Who's the audience? How would you see people in everyday life actually making use of specs?

Evan Spiegel: I think there are sort of three main categories that people will use specs for initially. One are just basic utilities, heads-up navigation, translation overlaid on the world around you. I actually really love the measurement tool. Super helpful. And then I think the other major categories are the large private display. One of the things that's unique about specs is you can get a really large immersive display in your pair of glasses. It's equivalent to a 24-inch desktop display or 115-inch home cinema screen placed about 10 feet away from you. For me, I miss my monitor when I'm on the road. I really love to work on a big screen. So to be able to bring a large display with me in a pair of glasses anywhere I'm working is really powerful. Then I think my favorite category and the thing I like doing the most with specs is all these incredible immersive and shared experiences, especially with our kids. It's just so fun to play games running around outside. Whether you're putting dinosaurs outside or playing chess or building Lego, there are so many incredible experiences that you can share together. That's what makes specs so different. They're not a single-player screen. They bring computing into the world in a way that you can share.

Sabrina Ortiz: So I'm a smart glasses aficionado as much as I've always worn glasses. Today I happen to be wearing contacts. But I love the idea of using something you already wear every day, or most people are already very familiar with, to expand and open a whole new world of capabilities. My one thing is I'm a bit concerned about wearability just because they're, what, 132 to 136 grams. So again, do you see people wearing them all day? They have four hours of battery life too. So is it more like, okay, I want my portable monitor, I'm going to put these on now and then take them off then? How do you see them?

Evan Spiegel: I think initially it's really going to be session-based. I almost think of them like reading glasses. It's something you want to put on to get things done or play a game or, as you mentioned, use the large private display, and then you can put them away when you're not using them. One of the things that is really convenient about specs is we designed a beautiful way to insert your own prescription, but also easily remove it if you want to share specs with other people. I think they're comfortable enough for folks to wear, but my guess would be, at least in this generation, that people will wear them more to experience specs and do things than an all-day pair of glasses.

Sabrina Ortiz: Got it. So again, it is more like that headset-like experience, except much more comfortable, much more aesthetic. We should probably talk about the design a bit too. They do keep that classic black frame glasses design, but they're a bit unique. Was that intentionally done? I think they stand out a bit, not in a bad way. This has a unique look to them. They're a little bit different than everyday glasses.

Evan Spiegel: Yeah. We really wanted to develop an iconic design. I think it's actually so important that people recognize specs when they see them, both just in terms of overall comfort out in the world. I think one of the things that creates a lot of discomfort or skepticism when people see a pair of Ray-Bans now, they're like, "Are you recording me?" It's like, no, it's just a regular pair of Ray-Bans. But I think that sort of feeling that people are surreptitiously recording you with camera glasses has created some stigma against glasses in general, or smart glasses at least. So for specs, we really wanted an iconic design that people understand is really a computer, so that hopefully they'll be tempted to try it out if they see someone out in the world using specs. Oh my gosh, I think it creates a starting point to have a real conversation.

Sabrina Ortiz: I like that you mentioned Meta. We also talked about Apple a bit with the Vision Pro. There are competitors who've been working on either the XR space, more heavily mixed reality, or in terms of Ray-Bans, just AI glasses. They've had the resources to do hardware really well. That's their bread and butter. How does Snap come in? How can you all compete? Because again, you have the years and years, and I don't know if everybody knows this, we'd love to hear more of this from you too, but all those lenses and filters that you've been using in Snapchat for years are actually AR experiences. So you have that expertise. Is that what makes you competitive against those hardware giants?

Evan Spiegel: I think one of the things that's really helped us is just our laser focus on see-through augmented reality glasses for the past 12 years. We've just taken a step-by-step approach, of course, to evolving the hardware and the hardware capability with our own proprietary optical engine. That's the little projector and the piece of glass that allows you to see computing in the world. But also our developer tools and our developer ecosystem. I think our developer ecosystem is now 450,000 developers who are building with Snap's augmented reality tools. Of course, we've also invested in our own operating system. What's so interesting about glasses, because it's such a difficult technical problem to solve, is that every single piece needs to work really well together. The benefit of running our rendering engine on low-end mobile phones for a really long time helped us get really good at running immersive experiences in a compute-constrained environment. Our evolution of our waveguide and ability to iterate on that constantly has driven the efficiency that allows us to get the form factor and battery life that people enjoy with specs today. So I think it's really the focus on that vision for making computing more human and bringing computing into the world around us that's helped us have this early mover advantage. Then longer term, I think that will be sustained by our developer community. Of course, all the incredible innovation that's coming that the world hasn't even seen yet. I think this is a great first step in terms of sharing specs with the broader world.

Sabrina Ortiz: In terms of the launch, again, we've been waiting for specs to come to consumers. I've tried the Spectacles, the developer's kit, over the years and multiple times. I've been waiting for this moment, as I think a lot of people have. Why now? Did the AI movement, the AI hype, and again, people's now more openness than ever to AI smart glasses impact that a bit? Why is today the right moment?

Evan Spiegel: Well, I think there are a couple things happening all at the same time. The first is that the technical capability has actually landed to be able to deliver this product, and I actually didn't think it was going to come this soon. It's so difficult to design such a performant optical engine. It's so challenging to be able to run all these immersive experiences in that form factor in such a compute-constrained environment. So really the convergence of all of the tech tracks we've been working on to land in this product is something that's really important and allows us to launch specs. But I think at the same time, what we're hearing a lot from folks and seeing a lot is that people are really questioning their relationship with screens, that people are spending on average, I think, more than seven hours a day staring down at screens. They feel like it's distracting them, it's pulling them out of the world, it's taking them out of the moment. I think we really want to evolve computing and make it more human and make it something that brings us together. Glasses are really the answer to that. Specs are the answer to that. I think we're launching at such an interesting moment when people are, almost 20 years since the iPhone, looking for something new and a new way to use computing.

Sabrina Ortiz: So we're here at this developer conference and everybody was super excited. You saw the announcement. It was really fun. The energy in that sense would be the case with developer conferences. But at the price point, and I do like that you did address it very carefully. You were like, we tried, this was a struggle, this was something that we had to put a lot of thought process behind. But who, again, target audience-wise, is your average everyday consumer, do you think, going to want to spend $2,100 on these glasses? Is it more for AI aficionados like myself, or the developers in the audience who are super invested in creating more for the platform? Who do you see for specs?

Evan Spiegel: The pricing at $2,195, it is similar pricing to a high-end laptop, for example. I do think people are accustomed to seeing pricing like that for computers, especially super performant computers like specs. So I think for us, certainly early adopters, of course, the developer community. But I also think as people learn what specs are capable of and try them, they will find all these different ways that specs fit into their life. Whether it is getting work done on the road or working on their golf swing or just playing a game with their teens or learning something new, I think as folks are able to understand specs' real capability and what they can do with all the amazing lenses that developers have built, that will draw more people to specs.

Sabrina Ortiz: It is pretty neat, too. We should talk about it. You decided to not go with any puck or any other attachment. I was super pleased. I always find those a bit inconvenient, assuming that was also extremely intentional.

Evan Spiegel: Yeah, that's so important to us. We've always wanted to make sure all the computing is on board, and that's part of being able to provide such a low-latency experience. That's what makes the immersion possible. So a seven-millisecond motion-to-photon latency really makes objects feel real in the world around you, and that's critical to delivering augmented reality.

Sabrina Ortiz: With Snap, are you now focusing more resources into the hardware world? Because your bread and butter, or at least as I see, has always been the Snapchat app. I saw a crazy stat. It's one of the most downloaded social media apps, or it was something wild, and it has remained that way for years. How do you see Snap going forward?

Evan Spiegel: Well, we're really excited to bring Snapchat onto specs, so we're going to share more this fall about the way you can use Snapchat on specs. Snapchat, the app, I think it's now more than 950 million monthly active users, so it's one of very, very few internet services that have reached that sort of scale. That's another huge advantage. We have this amazing, engaged community on Snapchat, and we think that they're going to be excited to try specs as well.

Sabrina Ortiz: Incredible. You, I'm assuming, have tried them out. You use them, hopefully, right? What are your favorite use cases?

Evan Spiegel: I think I'd have to say it's probably a tie between being able to bring a large display anywhere. That really makes a difference for me getting things done, or if I want to review a video we're putting out or whatever. It's so tough to do that on the small screen and pick up the details. So it's really nice to be able to have such a large display even when I'm on the road. But I think the thing that I love the most and what inspires me to work on specs and continue on this mission and towards our vision is when I can use them together with our kids or even with our friends. I think it's so interesting to have this experience where you realize computing goes from being something that's single-player down on a little screen to something you can share together. That, to me, is the biggest breakthrough that specs provide. Over time, and today, people are finding that out in these location-based experiences where you can use specs and play games together with your friends and run around. Over time, as more and more people use specs and there's more of them out in the world, I think that shared notion of what computing can be is really inspiring.

Sabrina Ortiz: I'm so glad you brought that up because, as I mentioned, I've tried the Spectacles, which was like the developer kit that preceded this over the years, and I have always said my favorite thing is how accurately it actually can place objects in your world and your environment, which, of course, is the AR component. And on top of that, you could interact with somebody else, and then both of your virtual worlds kind of mesh and collide, which is really neat. That, I would say, is the biggest distinguishing factor between specs and any of the other popular smart glasses that we've seen in the universe now, because those, even the ones with displays, are one-dimensional. But we talked about it before. It's one of those things that you kind of need to try to believe it, right?

Evan Spiegel: One hundred percent. That's going to be a huge focus for us as we roll out specs, just helping people try. I don't think people are familiar yet with what computing can be with specs. The look on people's faces when they put them on and they can play around and take specs for a spin, that just really makes my day. So I can't wait for more people to have that experience.

Sabrina Ortiz: At the moment, I was super bummed. There's no demos right now. Do you see in the future there being, again, capitalizing on the fact that people need to try them out to understand it for themselves, do you get more demos coming to people? Is the tech ready for these demos?

Evan Spiegel: Absolutely, yeah. We're super excited. We wanted to make sure today the focus was really on the developer community and showing them specs. Then, as we get closer to rollout, we're going to be sharing specs with more people. You'll be, I'm sure, one of the first to go hands-on.

Sabrina Ortiz: Hopefully. I will share my thoughts when I do. But until then, Evan, thank you so much. Congrats on, again, a great launch. You see the energy in the room. Everybody seems pretty excited. Thank you so much for taking the time on a very busy day. I can't wait to try them out and review them for myself too one day.

Evan Spiegel: Thank you. I really appreciate it.

Sabrina Ortiz: Awesome. Thank you so much.

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