Investors don’t appear to be so keen on Snap Inc.’s latest iteration of its smart glasses, which were unveiled at the Augmented World Expo in Long Beach in mid-June.

Shares of the social media company dropped roughly 17% in the immediate wake of the announcement on June 16, falling below the $5 mark. The price has since gained back some ground since the big reveal, currently standing at $4.84 a share as of Thursday.

Yet the jury is still out for the thick-framed augmented reality eyewear, called Specs and priced at $2,195. They’re the sixth iteration of the Santa Monica-based company’s wearables venture that first launched in 2016. Snap has long been at the forefront of AR and its hardware, though it’s best known for its social media platform. It was the first to launch augmented reality glasses. In 2021, Snap purchased Wave Optics, an optical engine developer, for $500 million.

Snap also began introducing AR Lenses to Snapchat, allowing users to overlay dog ears, sunglasses and animated characters onto selfies. The company capitalized on its popularity with the Lens Studio, which made it possible for developers to publish their own AR games and filters onto the social media and instant messaging platform.

The specs on SPECS

Over the years, Snap has also been developing its vertical AR supply chain, allowing the company to have full control over how it’s designed and the costs. In the world of AR glasses, companies have to balance how light it can sit on the head, how easy it is to charge it, and how usable and intuitive it is compared to a phone. By owning the full stack, Snap can better control the latency of AR superimpositions when a user moves
their head.

“Having ownership of the full vertical stack, this is not an easy thing to do. Every single piece from the hardware to the software operation system to the computer vision stack, to the developer tools – these are decisions we’ve taken to move faster than the competitors in this area,” Qi Pan, the director of computer vision engineering at Specs Inc., a subsidiary of Snap, said at the Augmented World Expo. “It allows us to do really unique things. It’s not easy to own every layer of the stack but once you do it you can actually move extremely quickly in this space.”

Snap cites several use cases for its AR glasses outside of video games, where AR has found the most success. The company envisions lenses that help users practice their golf putt, play the drums without owning a kit, or use AI to put together furniture with the directions right in front of their eyes, instead of on a piece of paper.

“These devices really allow AI to break away from just being something in a chat box,” Pan said. “This is where AI can actually sense the world around you. It can try to understand what you’re trying to do so it can help you in that moment to achieve what you’re trying to
achieve there.”

A long road

Despite Snap’s ongoing experimentation with AR, the company’s poor performance on the stock market (compared to Meta Platforms Inc.) has had some investors skeptical of its ventures in AR glasses.

In late March, activist investor Irenic Capital Management wrote in a public letter to Snap chief executive Evan Spiegel that the company needed to take different steps to
“unlock value.”

The firm, which owns 2.5% of Snap’s shares, encouraged Spiegel to either spin Specs out into a separate company or shutter the venture entirely.

“Snap has spent more than $3.5 billion on Specs and is spending (roughly $500 million) in cash annually,” Irenic Capital Management said in a statement. “At this point, if Specs cannot be funded on its own, it is time to shut it down.”

While the social media giant spent the last few years floundering, Spiegel has held on to his vision for AR in a public letter, titled “The Crucible Moment” – calling Specs “an enormous business opportunity.”

“Our operating system, personalized with context and memory, compounds in value over time,” he wrote. “A marketplace of digital goods, from spatial Lenses to virtual tools, has near-zero marginal cost and global reach. Specs are how we move beyond the limits of smartphones.”