LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA – JUNE 16: Evan Spiegel, Co-Founder and CEO, Snap Inc. unveils SPECS onstage at AWE 2026 at Lengthy Seaside Conference & Leisure Heart on June 16, 2026 in Lengthy Seaside, California. (Picture by Phillip Faraone/Getty Photographs for Snap)
Getty Photographs for Snap
This yr’s version of Augmented World Expo (AWE), which came about in Lengthy Seaside, CA final week, featured loads of new and forward-looking bulletins. However regardless of massive information from Snap, XReal, and Viture, alongside different gamers, a number of attendees have been haunted by the previous.
Particularly, they have been haunted by the dual failures of the Hololens and Magic Leap headsets. “We spent all this time and so many assets constructing for the Hololens,” mentioned one head of coaching, “After which the rug was pulled out from beneath us. It’s arduous to belief different firms who say they’re dedicated to headsets and glasses, as a result of there’s nothing to say we received’t need to pivot and begin once more in 5 years.”
In fact, pivoting with know-how tendencies is par for the course to a sure extent – firms routinely change and replace web sites and construct new apps. However the final a number of years have been rife with false begins and tech that appeared promising on the time, solely to not play out. Corporations purchased digital actual property within the metaverse and made NFTs for…causes. A buddy at a big financial institution informed me that just a few months after her CEO inspired everybody to make use of AI for each single job they might consider, he despatched a memo asking workers to curb token utilization. So the truth that enterprises are being cautious about adopting new immersive applied sciences stands to purpose, regardless that there may be ample proof that it may possibly present tangible advantages.
Fortunately, three of the foremost bulletins popping out of AWE this yr have been geared in direction of enterprise on some stage. That form of quantity – and the truth that Meta, Google, and Snap are all within the smartglasses house, alongside a number of Chinese language firms – is a testomony to the idea that glasses would be the subsequent computing type issue, and even when one participant disappears or there may be consolidation, others will are available to choose up the slack.
Begin with Snap, whose CEO Evan Spiegel opened the convention. Snap was an early participant within the smartglasses market, releasing camera-equipped sun shades again in 2016, however has struggled to seek out product/market match in recent times. The newly introduced Specs, nevertheless, signify an enormous leap ahead, as they don’t should be tethered to a smartphone or charging puck. Customers can work together with an AI agent through the glasses, in addition to watching content material, recording, and interacting with augmented actuality experiences.
Throughout the keynote, Spiegel positioned the glasses as a shopper machine, and a brooding, black-and-white movie star pushed advertising and marketing marketing campaign hammered his level dwelling. However with a $2,195 preliminary value level, it appears unlikely that buyers will undertake these en masse initially. Enterprise, nevertheless, can deal with the associated fee, and the strong function set will set it up as a stable potential alternative for different gadgets, or a compelling new platform.
XReal additionally made waves, saying its collaboration with Google, the Aura. The glasses weigh beneath 95 grams, and are powered by the brand new Snapdragon Actuality Elite chip, Qualcomm’s newest XR platform. The chip, together with Google’s Android XR, goals to assist the Aura glasses to satisfy calls for for “higher immersive experiences, increased efficiency, better intelligence, and improved energy optimization,” in line with a press release from Qualcomm’s XR head, Ziad Asghar.
The value is capped at $1500, which makes the glasses cheaper than Specs; however whereas Specs are standalone, the Aura is powered by an exterior battery pack. The Aura additionally has AI capabilities, powered by Google Gemini.
The third main announcement was the discharge of the Viture Helix glasses. Constructed on NVIDIA’s XR AI answer, Helix streams a wearer’s first-person perspective to a multimodal AI in actual time, enabling AI-assisted teaching, compliance, and full-provenance seize of each shift worn. Helix builds on a profitable collaboration between Viture, NVIDIA, the Le Cong Lab at Stanford College, and the Mengdi Wang Lab at Princeton College, the place the platform has already been used to allow AI-assisted workflows throughout wet-lab, medical, and life sciences analysis environments. Helix is anticipated to start transport in Q1 2027, with pricing ranging from $600.
The announcement of those three glasses, alongside steady updates from Meta and the forthcoming Google glasses, are a testomony to how a lot tech firms are betting on glasses as the following type issue for computing and interplay. Enterprise ought to begin now however push the smartglasses producers to supply deployment assist and dedication that was lacking within the HoloLens period; whereas nothing is ever really sure, it will go a protracted strategy to serving to CFOs and heads of innovation sleep at evening.