2018 is a new year Snapchat Spectacles as the next line of styles come to the new and improved AR glasses along with a 40% boost in use.

Rise of the specs

Though the initial launch of Snapchat’s Spectacles, among others, got critics and bloggers excited, the sales had yet to make a splash. Now, V.2.0 glasses are outselling the previous gen.

Snapchat is releasing two new “hipster styled” black-rimmed frames called the Nico and the Veronica, they’re slimmer and polarised for that out in the sun kind of fun.

But that’s where the technical improvements stop. With lackluster sales of the previous gen, Snapchat had hundreds of thousands of unsold specs. The answer? Disassemble, reassemble and make sexier.

The cost

The Spectacles V2 are on sale in the US and Europe for about $199 with exclusive in store-sales to be channeled through Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom.

Snapchat is also promoting more posts of footage and trying to learn from the pitfalls of GoPro that captures excellent video but provides little in the way of fine-tuned editing.

With disappointing sales of the V1, Snapchat only moved about 220,000 units. Though wearable tech is all the buzz, it’s the glasses ability to export video to other platforms that is really exciting. Snapchat’s expertise are in software, not hardware so here’s to hoping they found a happy medium.

Did you purchase the V1 Spectacles? Are you excited to hear about V2? Why or why not? Let us know what you think in our comments below.