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.

Bailenson and other Stanford researchers tested out the Meta Quest 3, a “mixed reality” headset that lets people blend physical and virtual worlds. While the headset is different from AR glasses, the gadget can display real-time video of a user’s surroundings in the physical world.

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.

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