Snap will pay $500 million for WaveOptics.

Snap Inc., owner of social media platform Snapchat, has made multiple endeavors in innovation in the field of photo-based social media. Their claim to fame is the numerous filters available for enhancing and altering photos taken with their app, but they have also been branching out into streaming entertainment and technological development. Their latest acquisition will give them a stronger foothold in the burgeoning augmented reality sector.

A representative of Snap Inc. confirmed to CNBC today that they are in the process of acquiring WaveOptics, a manufacturing company that specifically creates the parts needed to assemble augmented reality glasses. The deal will cost Snap approximately $500 million, with about half the price paid in stock upfront, while the other half will be paid in cash and stock over the next several years.

The announcement of this acquisition follows yesterday’s reveal of Snap’s new Spectacles augmented reality glasses. Presumably, the acquisition of WaveOptics is toward the goal of having a steady stream of parts available to manufacture the Spectacles en masse. Multiple tech and social media giants like Apple and Facebook have been working to create their own consumer-viable AR glasses technology, but Snap, with its existing experience in the sector thanks to its Snapchat filters, is uniquely poised to get the most possible out of the technology. Snapchat already possesses several helpful AR features such as searching and shopping, so theoretically, it would not be difficult to translate that functionality over to a pair of AR glasses.