Snap has detailed its latest OS, new AI tools, and more as it gets closer to the launch of its next-gen Specs launch in 2026.
The announcements – made during the company’s fifth annual developer conference ‘Lens Fest’ – was accompanied by the launch of Snap Cloud, a backend infrastructure designed to support more complex projects.
Celebrating a decade of Lenses, Snap’s Chief Technology Officer Bobby Murphy outlined a vision to create a comprehensive ecosystem for its 400,000 developers, who have collectively built over 4 million Lenses. This ecosystem is designed to take them from initial idea to a published and monetised AR experience.
“Our goal at Snap is to be the most developer friendly platform in the world, and our commitment to you has never been stronger,” Murphy stated during the keynote address.
Snap’s forthcoming Specs are positioned as the culmination of this strategy, merging AR with AI to understand and interact with the user’s environment. The glasses are intended to power a range of experiences from navigation and learning to translation. Snap also confirmed that all Lenses being built today will be compatible with the new hardware, ensuring creators’ work is “future-proof from day one”.
To enable this, the company recently introduced Snap OS 2.0, a revamped operating system for the smartglasses featuring faster performance, a new native browser with WebXR support, a new UI Kit, and Mobile Kit for simplifying development. New system-level features were also shown, including Travel Mode, which anchors digital content in moving vehicles, and EyeConnect, for initiating shared AR experiences by simply looking at another person.
Supporting these hardware plans is the new Snap Cloud, built in partnership with Supabase. This infrastructure addresses a major difficulty for developers by allowing them to offload heavy assets, bypass file size limits, and incorporate features like instant APIs, edge functions, and secure storage into their projects. It signals Snap’s long-term commitment to enabling everything from full-scale games to immersive location-based entertainment.
Monetisation was a central theme, with Snap introducing Commerce Kit. This will allow select developers to integrate payment systems directly inside their Lenses, enabling the sale of digital goods or premium features ahead of the launch of the next-gen Snap Specs. This builds on existing programmes like Lens Creator Rewards, which is now being expanded with Lens+ Payouts. This new system allows creators to earn money based on engagement from Lens+ and Snapchat Platinum subscribers, providing a clear path to building a portfolio of monetised Lenses.
Snap also announced it is making its Camera Kit SDK completely free with optional branding. Camera Kit, which integrates Snap’s AR technology into third-party apps and websites, reached over 68 million monthly active users in Q3. Responding to developer feedback, the removal of mandatory branding is intended to make it the “best tool for all kinds of client work”.
The creative process itself is receiving a major AI upgrade with Snap’s introduction of Lens Studio AI, which makes building a Lens “as easy as having a conversation”. This generative tool can write code, debug scripts, suggest assets, and even generate entire Lenses from a text prompt.
Further enhancing creation is a new framework called Blocks, which are modular, AR-ready components like scripts and effects that can be combined to build a Lens. Developers can create their own private Blocks or publish them for the community to use to start building their own experiences ahead of the next-gen Snap Specs launch.
Snap also showed off several new AI-powered creative capabilities. Realistic StyleGen delivers true-to-life AR effects with accurate texture and lighting, while Enhanced FaceGen offers finer control over facial geometry for character transformations. A feature called AI Clips will soon allow creators to use the company’s video generative model to produce their own image-to-video Lenses.
Gaming remains a key growth area, with over 175 million people playing Lens Games on Snapchat every month. To further develop this, Snap is integrating games directly into Chat with a new Games Chat Drawer. New components like a Character Controller and Camera Controller have been added to the Asset Library to make game creation easier. The introduction of live multiplayer matchmaking next year promises to be a new foundation for real-time social gaming on the platform.
High-profile partners are already building for the platform. Experiences like Star Wars: Holocron Histories from Industrial Light & Magic and Paramount’s Avatar: The Last Airbender are now available on Spectacles, with more to come from brands like Tripadvisor.
“Snap’s AR technology and Spectacles platform offered us an entirely new canvas for storytelling,” said Ian Bowie, Lead Experience Designer of Star Wars: Holocron Histories.
Ariella Morik, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Tripadvisor, added that the partnership allows them to “reimagine how travelers experience the world.”
By providing an end-to-end platform with AI capabilities, Snap is betting heavily on its global developer community to build the next generation of human-centric computing as it gears up to launch its next-gen Specs in 2026.
“If you can imagine it, you can build it and scale it here,” concluded Snap CTO Bobby Murphy.
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