Snapchat's parent company has announced it is releasing new smart glasses, a decade after its original pair lost the company tens of millions of dollars . The new augmented reality (AR) glasses, called Specs, will allow users to see digital elements overlaid onto the world. They will cost £1,995 in the UK and $2,195 in the US when shipping begins this autumn. That makes them cheaper than Apple's Vision Pro mixed-reality headset and its $3,499 starting price, but far more than Meta's smart glasses, which start at $224. Evan Spiegel, co-founder and chief executive of Snap Inc, said the glasses marked the beginning of a new era in computing.

Evan Spiegel doesn't want you to call Snap Specs AI glasses Evan Spiegel doesn't want you to call Snap Specs AI glasses Snap's CEO sat down with Engadget after his keynote at AWE. Snap's newly announced AR Specs might seem similar to other smartglasses, but Snap CEO Evan Spiegel says that's the wrong way to think about the product. Specs, he says, is a new type of computer, a see-through computer. Shortly after unveiling Specs at AWE, Spiegel sat down with Engadget to tell us more about the device we got a glimpse of onstage. The CEO repeatedly referred to Specs as a computer and that really is core to understanding how Snap is positioning the product (and justifying the price). Specs, Spiegel said, is able to overlay computing on the world around you and bring computing into the world, which is so important if you want to make computing feel more human. But Snap will have to do more than just persuade people to buy a computer for their face.

The company also debuted a new platform for brands wanting to build their own AI glasses. High-end augmented reality and mixed reality devices are set to get a boost thanks to Qualcomm's latest XR chip. During a keynote at Augmented World Expo (AWE), the company unveiled its Snapdragon Reality Elite processor, which it says will allow the next generation of AR and mixed reality headsets to be smaller and more efficient. In terms of specs, the Snapdragon Reality Elite can support up to 4.4K resolution in each eye at 90 fps, a modest upgrade from the XR2+ Gen 2, but one that Qualcomm says will enable better image quality and lower latency. It also delivers significant improvements in terms of efficiency, with up to 20 percent boost in battery life while running up to 12 degrees Celsius (about 54 degrees Fahrenheit) cooler, compared with the XR2+ Gen 2. Performance-wise, Reality Elite comes with notable gains over the previous generation as well.

You Can Finally Buy Snap's New AR Specs--for $2,195 Snap CEO Evan Spiegel lays out the company's vision for its augmented-reality smart glasses, arriving later this year. Snap--maker of the popular social app Snapchat--has a new pair of augmented-reality smart glasses called Specs. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel revealed the new glasses at an event during the Augmented World Expo (AWE) tech conference in Long Beach, California. As Snap frames it, this isn't a prototype or developer device--it's the first actual consumer version of the Specs AR glasses, unlike the previous generation exclusively sold to developers and creators. Snap says it expects the devices to ship this fall in the US, UK, and France.

Snap's slimmed down AR Specs go on sale later this year for $2,195 Snap's slimmed down AR Specs go on sale later this year for $2,195 It's the first time the company will be selling its AR glasses to the public. It's been almost five years since Snap began experimenting with standalone augmented reality glasses. Now, the company is finally ready to start selling them to the public, though they won't be cheap. During a keynote today at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel unveiled the company's latest AR Specs that he said represent the beginning of a new era in computing. The $2,195 glasses come with a wider field of view, upgraded battery life and, perhaps most importantly, a slimmed down form factor compared with the oversized, developer-only glasses it showed off in 2024 .

Best-of-N selection is a key technique for improving the reasoning performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) through increased test-time computation. Current state-of-the-art methods often employ computationally intensive reward models for response evaluation and selection. Reward-free alternatives, like self-consistency and universal self-consistency, are limited in their ability to handle open-ended generation tasks or scale effectively. To address these limitations, we propose self-certainty, a novel and efficient metric that leverages the inherent probability distribution of LLM outputs to estimate response quality without requiring external reward models. We hypothesize that higher distributional self-certainty, aggregated across multiple samples, correlates with improved response accuracy, as it reflects greater confidence in the generated output. Through extensive experiments on various reasoning tasks, we demonstrate that self-certainty (1) scales effectively with increasing sample size N, akin to reward models but without the computational overhead; (2) complements chain-of-thought, improving reasoning performance beyond greedy decoding; and (3) generalizes to open-ended tasks where traditional self-consistency methods fall short. Our findings establish self-certainty as a practical and efficient way for improving LLM reasoning capabilities.

The'disappearing into the bushes like Homer Simpson' strategy is a bold choice. Only a day after a dormant bit of code that seemed to be a facial recognition algorithm was discovered in a companion app for its smart glasses, Meta released an update which removed that code, Wired reported. The publication had first uncovered the suspicious code, internally dubbed Name Tag within Meta, while reviewing code for a Meta AI app which handles some core features of the glasses. In other words, the same app necessary for pairing Meta smart glasses to a user's phone over Bluetooth was also ready to start harvesting every face a user passed by while wearing them. It contained algorithms which would have converted photos of faces into biometric identifiers stored on-device and cross referenced with each new facial scan.

PCWorld reports Google's new Gemini-powered smart glasses prototype represents a refined approach to smart eyewear, manufactured by Samsung with discreet camera and touch controls. The lightweight glasses integrate Google's AI assistant for real-world navigation, search functions, and phone replacement capabilities while maintaining a normal sunglasses appearance. Despite improved public acceptance and seamless design, limitations include basic heads-up display, battery concerns, and sometimes forced AI features. A decade after Google launched Google Glass to spectacular failure, it's trying again. And I think that the world (and I) will be more receptive to what Google's online AI interpreter, Gemini, can do when plugged into your ear.

Gear Wearables Google's Android XR smart glasses hope to succeed where AI-first wearables have failed The audio-only frames pair with Android and iOS so a Gemini agent can run errands on your phone while you stay heads-up. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. Google put AI on people's faces more than a decade ago with its Google Glass wearable. It was designed to put a computer directly on your face, but the world (and to some extent, the hardware) wasn't quite ready for that yet.

Google is sprucing up its Gemini models, revamping search, and enabling AI agents in everything. There are also some spiffy new smart glasses coming this fall. Google just wrapped its keynote address at its annual I/O developer event . The company showed off a swath of new agentic AI features and some demos of its upcoming Android-powered smart glasses. As it has in the past few years, the spectacle largely revolved around Google's perpetual stream of AI efforts.