If you were casting someone to sell augmented reality glasses, it’s hard to think of a better pick than the man who spent a decade playing Tony Stark, a character whose entire world was a heads-up display.
Image: Snap
Snap evidently had the same thought. On October 20, the company named Robert Downey Jr. the honorary Chief Customer Experience Officer of Specs, its see-through AR glasses. His job, in plain terms, is to help people understand what Specs are and why they might want a pair.
What Downey Jr. will actually do
According to Snap, Downey Jr. will work across the Specs team on new features, Lens experiences, original content, hardware collaborations and in-person events. His first project is a series of episodes in which he tests Specs in everyday situations: at work, on the golf course, for entertainment and while learning creative skills. The first episodes are on the Specs website and YouTube, with more to come.
Snap is putting real airtime behind it, too. A partnership segment ran during the Knicks vs. 76ers game on October 20, and an episode is set to air during Game 1 of the World Series on Friday, October 23.
His pitch is short and on message: “Trying is believing.” He says he was “absolutely sold on SPECS within 40 seconds.” Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said the company was “incredibly excited to welcome Robert Downey Jr. to SPECS to help shape the future of augmented reality.”
The price problem he’s been hired to solve
There’s a reason Snap wants a star. Specs cost $2,195 and go on sale later this fall. That’s a lot of money for a category most people have never tried, and Snap’s share price fell when Spiegel unveiled the glasses at the Augmented World Expo in June. The company needs to make the case that this is something you’d want to wear, not just a clever demo.
Neither side has disclosed the terms of the deal. Earlier this year, tech reporter Alex Heath reported that Snap was in talks to pay around $100 million, but that figure has never been confirmed.
The celebrity glasses wars have begun
The timing is telling. Only days ago, Meta announced a Doja Cat documentary shot almost entirely on Ray-Ban Meta glasses, with a store takeover in Los Angeles to match. Now Snap has answered with Iron Man.
The two companies are selling quite different products. Meta’s best sellers are camera-and-audio glasses priced for the mainstream, while Specs are full AR glasses with see-through displays at a premium price. But both have clearly reached the same conclusion: the next stage of this market is about winning over ordinary people, and you don’t do that with spec sheets. You do it with famous faces wearing the product somewhere people are already watching, like a stage, a ballpark or a basketball court.
Our take
We think this is a smart signing, and a necessary one. Downey Jr. carries more AR associations than almost anyone in Hollywood, and “trying is believing” is exactly the right message for a product most people can’t picture until they’ve had it on.
But a famous face only gets people to look. At $2,195, Specs will have to win on what they do once they’re on someone’s head, and we’ll know far more when real buyers get their hands on them later this fall. Until then, it’s Iron Man versus Doja Cat, and the battle for your face has officially gone Hollywood.