In 2012, Google announced an augmented-reality “wearable computer” that it would eventually sell to the public in 2014 as Google Glass. The video accompanying its initial pitch was surprising in that no company of Google’s size or stature had attempted to build something like this before and yet familiar and conceptually obvious: Glasses that overlay the wearer’s world with information have been treated as a pop-cultural sci-fi inevitability for longer than would-be Glass purchasers had been alive:

Google Glass never quite worked like this. It was genuinely interesting to try, and had a better-than-expected screen and a few impressive tricks, but wearing a pair felt like being trapped in a perpetual, often pointless tech demo. Worse still — and in retrospect this was the defining part of the Google Glass experience — it was alienating and antisocial. On users’ faces, they drew attention away from the people you were talking to, who were also made to worry, not incorrectly, that they were potentially being recorded. They started fights in bars. They gave us “glassholes.” As an experimental product, they seemed to confirm two hypotheses: that building augmented-reality glasses was hard but possible and that, compared with getting people to use and collectively accept general-purpose surveillant face computers, developing technology was actually the easy part.

This week, nearly 15 years later, Snap announced its own long-gestating take on the concept, the $2,195 Specs:

On paper, Specs are much more powerful than Google Glass ever was. Rather than a little floating display off to the side, the screen is layered into the lenses. (They’re quite a bit chunkier, like a swollen pair of old Cutler and Grosses.) But the continuity is obvious. In 2012, Google’s Sergey Brin talked........

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