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The CEO of Snap Inc, the company behind Snapchat and the Spectacles AR glasses, will take the stage at AWE 2025 in June to highlight the company’s latest developments in AR. The prominent placement on the event’s schedule comes as Snap aims to strengthen its foothold in the XR industry.

Snap may be one of the only companies offering fully standalone AR glasses that you can get today, but the company is still seen as an outsider among the broader XR community.

That’s partly because Snap is approaching its AR ambitions from a different angle than other major players in the space.

Standalone headsets like Quest join the likes of PC VR & PSVR 2 as primarily gaming-focused devices. Then there’s Apple’s Vision Pro which focuses on entertainment and productivity.

Meanwhile, Snap’s Spectacles are born out of the company’s social-centric approach to AR, which emphasizes both location-based and co-located experiences (meaning experiences which are tied to real-world locations and those which involve multiple users in the same physical space).

This June, Snap CEO and co-founder Evan Spiegel will take to the main stage at AWE 2025—one of the largest and longest-running XR-focused conferences in the world—in an effort to share the company’s vision for AR and to strengthen bridges into the existing XR industry.

The event is being held in Long Beach, California from June 10th to 12th, and it’s expected to host more than 6,000 attendees, 300 exhibitors, 400 speakers, and a 150,000 sqft expo floor. Early-bird tickets are still available, and Road to VR readers can get an exclusive 20% discount.

Spiegel’s keynote will be flanked by presentations from Qualcomm and XREAL, peers which are well established in the conference and the industry at large.

Ironically, Snap’s commitment to building an AR platform from the ground up is one reason why it has remained something of an outsider in the XR space.

The company isn’t just building its own AR glasses, it’s also building Snap OS, a bespoke operating system for Spectacles. And it has its own authoring tool—Lens Studio—which developers need to learn to build for the headset, rather than using off-the-shelf tools like Unity. The unique approach and device capabilities mean that porting existing XR content isn’t straightforward.

Yet its commitment to building its platform from the ground up shows the company’s authentic belief in the XR space.

Speaking recently to Road to VR, Snap’s VP of Hardware, Scott Myers, said that the company is building Spectacles to be more than just an extension of Snapchat. The company believes glasses like Spectacles will one day replace smartphones altogether. This belief is guiding the standalone nature of Spectacles, which is designed to work without a phone or tethered compute unit.

“We want people to look up [through their glasses], not down [at their smartphone,” Myers said.

Beyond its emphasis on social and location-based AR experiences, Myers said the company is uniquely focused on making its platform the best in the world for developers, by building great tools and iterating aggressively on feedback.

Myers said he personally uses Spectacles “nearly every day” to test new features and experiences. “We’re learning together with developers to make developing [as easy as possible],” he said.

Snap will need to play its cards right to position itself for success in the coming years, as tech giants Meta, Apple, and Google are all vying to be the first to build a pair of mainstream AR glasses.

Road to VR is proud to be the Premier Media Partner of AWE USA 2025, allowing us to offer readers an exclusive 20% discount on tickets to the event.