Snap Inc. brought 45 Spectacles developers to its Santa Monica headquarters on May 11 for a full-day bootcamp with the engineering teams building the platform, marking the company’s first in-person gathering of its AR developer community.

The agenda included technical sessions on SnapOS’s road ahead, sparse mapping, AI-native Lens development, spatial UI and performance optimization, Snap Cloud integration using Supabase, and hands-on guidance with the Spectacles Interface Kit and UI Kit. A dedicated session on Agent Manager addressed how AI tools are shaping Lens development on the platform.

Snap reports hundreds of developers from 30 countries are currently building Lenses for Spectacles. The 45 attendees at the bootcamp represented an international cross-section of that community, with participants traveling from Zambia, Sweden, and Belgium.

Developer Feedback

Attendees described the event as a shift in how they approach building on the platform. “This was one of the most valuable Snap events I’ve attended. The mix of vision, hands-on content, and direct access to the team made a big difference,” said developer Baruch Geuze. “It really shifted my mindset from ‘making lenses’ to thinking in terms of spatial products and long-term use cases.”

Developer Steven Wolpe added, “I left feeling inspired by all the other creators and devs and by the Spectacles team themselves. Definitely charged my battery. Can’t wait for AWE and what comes next.”

Looking Ahead

Snap plans to share additional details about its “SPECS” developer program and platform roadmap at AWE in June 2026. The company reported investing more than $3 billion in its AR hardware initiative and positions its upcoming Specs as “an ultra-powerful wearable computer integrated into a lightweight pair of glasses with see-through lenses.”

The bootcamp follows the release of Snap’s fifth-generation Spectacles to developers in 2024 and precedes the planned public launch of “SPECS” in 2026.

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