LENS FEST 2025: Where's Snap Spectacles Going?

Having attended every Lens Fest since its intimate beginnings in 2018 with a handful of Official Lens Creators, it's incredible to see how it's evolved. From a private gathering fostering a nascent AR community, it's now a widely publicized event, drawing many creators globally with a major keynote, multiple days of demos, exciting announcements, and a highly competitive 24-hour hackathon.

My curiosity for Lens Fest 2025 was particularly piqued. Snapchat launched the second iteration of their fully immersive AR Spectacles at Lens Fest 2024, and at Augmented World Expo this past summer, CEO Evan Spiegel announced a consumer release for 2026. I was hopeful for a sneak peek at the final product this year, but it was not to be.

Surprisingly, there was hardly any mention of the new Spectacles, beyond a keynote reiteration of their 2026 arrival. Despite my best efforts to unearth information, everyone's lips were sealed. For Spectacles to truly succeed as a consumer device, they'll need significant slimming down, much-improved battery life, and redesigned optics to function as usable glasses. While there was some scuttlebutt about Snap's relentless work on these challenges, the question remains: have they solved them?

Given the rich feature set of Spectacles and the known limitations of current tech in terms of battery, thermal management, compute power, and display, how is this even possible? Evan himself seems deeply committed to this vision, having dismissed Meta's new Ray-Ban Display glasses as "not too useful" during an on-stage interview at Lens Fest (paraphrased, and although he didn't name them, we all knew what he was talking about). Could Snap be preparing to stun us all next year?

Snap OS 2.0 was the major announcement for Spectacles at Lens Fest 2025, bringing UI improvements, a travel mode, and, perhaps most crucially, support for Supabase. With Supabase, Snap now offers an API that significantly simplifies persistent data storage, sharing, and processing in the cloud for Spectacles Lenses. These features are seamlessly integrated into the Snap Spectacles development environment, empowering developers to create genuinely useful AR applications beyond mere gimmicks and demos.

Spectacles currently stand as the only fully immersive AR glasses platform available for development today. They're readily accessible to developers, boast an app ecosystem, and Snap is actively building the AR platform of the future with the rapidly evolving Snap OS. This stands in stark contrast to Meta, where many are still trying to figure out if development on their Display glasses will even be possible, let alone how to acquire a pair.

While consumer Spectacles were absent from Lens Fest, the platform saw numerous developments that underscore Snap's commitment to building Spectacles into a world-class AR wearables platform—perhaps the first of its kind. While Supabase might not be the most "sexy" reveal, it represents critical infrastructure for developers, essential for building a successful and scalable AR platform.

But how will they launch this as a consumer product? Are they ready to go head-to-head with Meta's Ray-Bans? We'll have to wait and see what 2026 reveals. I'm genuinely curious to witness how Meta and Snap's diametrically opposed visions for the future will unfold.