These new AR glasses are amazing. And extremely goofy. Before I get to Snap’s new Spectacles, a confession: I have a long history of putting goofy new things on my face and liking it. Back in 2011, I tried on Sony’s head-mounted 3D glasses and,

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.

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.

Snap’s latest augmented reality glasses have a completely new — but still very oversized — design, larger field of view and all-new software that supports full hand tracking abilities.

This comes days ahead of rival Meta set to showcase its AR glasses at the Meta Connect conference and Apple Inc having set the stage for its AR glasses that have reportedly been under development.

These subscription-based developer glasses aim to go where bigger headsets like the Quest 3 and Vision Pro can't yet.