I attended the official launch of the Snap Specs, the company's bold new smart glasses, which stand apart from others in the space with an innovative hands-free navigation and a new "anticipatory AI" Specs Intelligence platform. And I want to be up front: I don't think these glasses are for you or me.
With a starting price of $2,195, Specs are a hard sell for a device that is only rated to last for four hours on battery life. Even if the "instinctual" computing is genuinely interesting, Specs are for early adopters.
However, one performance has me intrigued by Specs and the future of the technology packed into these AR glasses.
And it's all thanks to the artist Imogen Heap.
Improvised creation
If you didn't stick around for the entire Specs presentation, you missed Spiegel introducing Imogen Heap as a Specs partner and her improvised performance. Check out the YouTube video above to see her act.
She is one of several celebrities including Hoyeon, Jimmy Butler and Jack Harlow who partnered with Snap to create bespoke apps (or Lenses as Snap calls them) for the smart glasses.
If you didn't know, Heap is well-versed in the tech world, having created a music-based blockchain and a pair of musical gloves, and has praised generative AI in art and music. Her stances are, to put it mildly, controversial.
For the last 10 minutes or so of the hour-long presentation, Heap took to the stage and detailed her Lens and then improvised a song using it. Her performance is the first time I took Specs seriously.
An intriguing future
Snap's glasses are impressive, but a lot of the tools it has we've seen in other products or will be coming in glasses that we expect to launch in the coming months, like the Xreal Aura and whatever Meta debuts at Connect 2026. That includes turn-by-turn navigation, digital overlays, and voice-controlled AI.
Snap does wrap it up in an interesting package, but at that price and with this design, I'm not sure it's that much better than anything else that already exists.
However, watching Imogen Heap creatively use the tools to loop sounds, create beats, and gesture to raise the volume or reverb was the sci-fi moment I've been waiting for.
AI-obsessed companies keep promising the revolution that it will bring to our lives, but watching Heap seemingly wave at the air and create music out of nothing was the window opening for me.
Yes, gesture controls already exist, and plenty of VR headsets have you pinching for menu buttons, but on a relatively small pair of glasses, this felt like a step forward for AR and VR and not just a lateral move or the promise of immersion while looking like a Lobot cosplay.
This is, as I said, early adopter technology, but I hope it lands just enough that the tools Snap is playing with get more expansive and reachable for more than the idly curious rich that haunted Beverly Hills this week.
Follow Tom's Guide on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our up-to-date news, analysis, and reviews in your feeds.
More from Tom's Guide
