Snap’s $2,195 AR glasses target a post-smartphone era — and push producers to rethink the grammar of the screen and the storyteller’s place

The global Specs campaign, photographed by Steven Meisel. ⓒSnap Inc.

A premise the video industry has long taken for granted is starting to shift: that viewers look into a rectangular screen. Specs, the augmented-reality glasses Snap opened for pre-order on June 16, challenges that premise head-on, proposing to lay content over the real world rather than confine it inside a frame. Nearly two decades after the iPhone, mobile has matured, concerns over screen fatigue and digital wellbeing have grown, and deep-pocketed players — Meta, Google, Apple — have entered the same market, turning the race toward a post-smartphone era into a contest in earnest. That shift puts hard questions to how video is made, distributed, and watched.

스냅, 2,195달러 AR 글래스 ‘스펙스’ 출시… 스마트폰 이후 컴퓨팅에 회사 미래를 걸다
스냅 2,195달러 독립형 AR 글래스 ‘스펙스‘로 메타·구글·애플과 ‘포스트 스마트폰’ 정면 승부. 글로벌 캠페인에 정호연이 합류하며 K-콘텐츠·디스플레이 산업에도 새 기회 열어.
K-EnterTech HubJung Han

What Specs offers

Specs is available at SPECS.COM for $2,195, with a $200 refundable deposit, and ships this fall in the United States, United Kingdom, and France. Snap frames it as a new category — more capable than AI glasses, more wearable than headsets — that runs standalone, with no puck or tether. Its proprietary LCoS display delivers a 51-degree field of view and 16 million colors, projecting anything from a 24-inch work monitor to a 115-inch home-cinema screen about ten feet away. “The smartphone put our lives in our pockets,” said co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel. “Specs put computing into the world, where life actually happens.”