Snap Inc. Chief Executive Officer Evan Spiegel unveiled a new version of the company’s Spectacles smart glasses, revitalizing an effort to build an advanced augmented reality product that may one day replace or rival the smartphone.

Powering the new Spectacles is the new Snap OS and a pair of Qualcomm Snapdragon processors, which Snap says will split the processing tasks. During the demo, Spiegel also used the glasses to take a video of the crowd, so it appears that these spectacles will maintain some of their original utility.

Snap partnered with chipmaker Qualcomm and OpenAI’s ChatGPT to create the AR Spectacles, which allow users to place digital images and filters onto the real world through the lenses.

Tech giants including Meta, Snap, Google and others are racing to build smart glasses. It could change our lives for the better or worse.

Snap 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.

Sticking their goal of tech-augmented eyesight, the makers of the popular photo app Snapchat have launched their latest pair of glasses that can superimpose digital objects into real environments. The new generation of "Spectacles" with transparent lenses offers better display quality and faster response times.

Snap on Tuesday, September 17, introduced its fifth-generation augmented reality glasses, Spectacles, designed to overlay digital graphics onto the real world. These glasses are currently only accessible to developers who are willing to pay a monthly subscription fee of $99 for a year.