Snap advances bet on augmented reality with new version of Spectacles glasses

Snap (SNAP.N), opens a new tab

 announced an upgraded version of its Spectacles augmented-reality glasses on Tuesday, doubling down on its bet that wearable devices to enhance the view of the real world will be one of the next frontiers in tech.

Snap, long known for its ephemeral messaging app Snapchat and animated filters, has been an early leader in augmented reality, which can overlay digital effects onto photos or videos of real-life surroundings through a camera or lens.

The first edition of Spectacles launched in 2016, but the effort has not increased revenue for Snap, whose business relies on selling digital advertising.

Larger rivals are also racing to advance AR. Meta, which opens a new tab is expected to unveil its first AR glasses during its Connect developer conference next week.

The fifth generation of Spectacles is powered by a new operating system called Snap OS. The user interface responds to the wearer's hands and voice and the operating system better understands the user's surroundings to render AR effects, said Snap CEO Evan Spiegel during the company's annual partner summit.

The glasses have a larger field of vision than previous generations and automatically tints in sunlight.

Spectacles will not be sold to consumers initially and instead will be available for $99 per month to developers who create AR features.

That is a key step toward building adoption among everyday users, Spiegel said in an interview ahead of the summit.

"There has to be really compelling experiences," he said. "By working really closely with developers and just continuously improving our platform, I think we're going to get to a place where there are a lot of compelling lenses for people to try with Spectacles."

The new operating system will also enable developers to make better AR experiences between two or more Spectacles wearers, Snap said. For example, two users in the same room could play chess on a virtual board that is rendered in the players' surroundings.

A SIMPLIFIED SNAPCHAT

Snap also announced a redesign of the Snapchat app, reducing its previous five separate sections to three. The company previously simplified how users can interact with ads on Snapchat to improve results for advertisers.

Still, Snap shares are down 40% this year as the company struggled against larger digital ad platforms with more users.

In a letter to staff this month, Spiegel said Snap has reversed two years of declining revenue and would continue to compete for ad dollars by going after smaller advertisers.

But he laid out the case for continuing to pursue AR, citing it as a nascent field where Snap can create user demand.

"Unlike in digital advertising, where we were a late entrant in a market with established, scaled players, we are a leader in the market for this new type of glasses," he said.

At its annual Snap Partner Summit on Tuesday, Snapchat announced that it’s introducing a new AI video-generation tool for creators. The tool will allow select creators to generate AI videos from text prompts and, soon, from image prompts. 

Snap says the tool will be available in beta on the web starting today for a small subset of creators. For now, Snap doesn’t have any plans to make Snap AI Video available to anyone beyond creators.  

While the company didn’t share any additional details about the AI video-generation tool during the keynote, a spokesperson for the company told TechCrunch in an email that the tool is powered by Snap’s own foundational video models.

“We know it’s important for our community to be informed when AI is being used to generate content,” said Ceci Mourkogiannis, Snap’s vice president of product, during the keynote. “So we use icons and context cards to let you know when a Snap is made with Snap AI.”

Image Credits: Snap

All of the content created with Snap AI Video will include a watermark that will stay visible when content is downloaded and shared. 

A Snap spokesperson said the company’s models undergo safety evaluations and testing to prevent them from creating harmful content and that it has additional safety mitigations in place during the model training process, at prompt creation, and at the output stage.

Snap’s announcement puts it ahead of its social media peers, including TikTok and Instagram, which have yet to release text-to-video AI generators. Although Meta unveiled a tool called Make-A-Video back in 2022 that enables text-to-video generation, it hasn’t released it to the public. 

The company is likely hoping to go up against startups like Runway, along with popular companies like OpenAI and Adobe, both of which plan to release text-to-video AI generators to the public later this year. 

However, given that Snap hasn’t shared any examples of outputs from its AI video-generation tool, it’s unclear how its product will fare against these other tools. 

Snapchat is undergoing its biggest redesign in years by simplifying from five to three tabs: one for messages and Stories with friends, one for the camera, and another for a TikTok-like feed of full-screen videos from creators and publishers.

The redesign, dubbed “Simple Snapchat,” was announced onstage Tuesday at Snap’s annual Partner Summit in Los Angeles. “It brings Stories closer to conversations, it simplifies content discovery, and it brings people straight into our camera to express themselves,” Snap CEO Evan Spiegel tells The Verge.

Until now, Snapchat has consisted of five main tabs: one for the Snap Map, private chats, the camera, Stories, and Spotlight, its competitor to TikTok and Instagram Reels. Once this redesign is rolled out to Snapchat’s 850 million users, the Snap Map will be accessible from the messaging tab, along with Stories from your friends and creators you follow.

To the right of the camera will be a new, unified For You feed of full-screen videos from publishers and creators. Here, Snap has essentially merged Spotlight with content from media brands like The Wall Street Journal and the Daily Mail. The company makes most of its money from the ads it runs around this content, so it’s rolling the redesign out slowly so “we can really understand any changes in content dynamics,” according to Spiegel.

GIF: Snap

The high-level goal of this redesign is to make Snapchat more accessible and an attractive way to watch videos you’d normally go to TikTok or Instagram for. Spiegel also thinks it will translate to a better business for Snap’s creators, who collectively share more than a billion pieces of content per month in the app.

“One of the things that creators have done very effectively uses short-form video to grow their Stories audience and then monetize the Stories through our revenue share program,” he says. “I think that will become even easier with this app layout, where the Stories from your friends or from creators you’re following live on the chat page, and then you can discover new creators or new content in full screen on the third tab.”