But the market for Spectacles — and AR glasses in general — still feels as nascent as ever.
These new Spectacles, announced Tuesday at Snap’s annual Partner Summit in Los Angeles, aren’t being sold.
Instead, Snap is repeating its playbook for the last version of Spectacles in 2021 and distributing them to the people who make AR lenses for Snapchat.
Yes, Snap is asking developers to pay $1,188 over the course of a year to access these Spectacles.
(Snap isn’t disclosing how many pairs of these Spectacles it’s making, but my sources peg the number at around 10,000.)
Since then, bigger players — namely Meta — have signaled that they, too, are building AR glasses.
Apple is working on them separately from the Vision Pro, and Google is developing AR glasses with Magic Leap and Samsung.
Meta will show off its long-rumored AR glasses prototype, codenamed Orion, at its Connect conference next week.
Still, Spiegel believes enough of them are excited about the promise of AR glasses and that they’ll want to help shape that future.
AR glasses may be the future, and Spectacles may be well-positioned to become the next major computing platform, even with competition heating up.
With their richer, more immersive display, Snap’s fifth-generation Spectacles are impressive. It feels more rapid to use them. While charging, they last longer.
These are precisely the kind of improvements you would anticipate from a product line that is, in theory, eight years old. However, it still seems like the market for Spectacles and AR glasses in general is very young.
Developers are Snap’s suggestion for how to make that happen. At Snap’s annual Partner Summit in Los Angeles on Tuesday, the company unveiled these new Spectacles; they will not be available for purchase. Rather, Snap is giving them to the individuals who create AR lenses for Snapchat and simply rehashing its strategy for the final iteration of Spectacles in 2021. This time, there’s an additional requirement: to gain access, you must use Lens Studio, the company’s desktop application for developing augmented reality software, and pay $99 a month to rent a pair for a minimum of a year.
To access these Spectacles, developers are required to pay $1,188 to Snap over a 12-month period. CEO of Snap, Evan Spiegel, is confident that interest will still exist.
He tells me, “Our main objective is to inspire and empower the developer and AR enthusiast communities.”. “Actually, this is a call to create, hopefully with some inspiration. “.
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My demo of the new Spectacles felt a lot like my demo of the previous Spectacles in 2021, minus the vibrant developer ecosystem that Snap hopes to build. A human body’s anatomy was displayed in three dimensions on one lens, while flowers blossomed where your hands were directed. I could launch a browser and open a floating window with this exact webpage.
Although Spectacles’ hardware has improved, the software still seems fairly simple for a stand-alone device. Here, it’s clear that Snap is looking to developers to assist in creating compelling use cases. All in all, my experience was pretty much what I’ve come to expect from AR hardware demos over the years: gimmicky, light-weight apps that showcase the hardware, but not experiences I would want to revisit on my own time.
I didn’t spend much time with Snap’s My AI chatbot, but there were other new apps to check out, such as that one. AI was used by a new AR lens I tried to create 3D animations in response to voice commands. Apart from Bitmojis on account profiles, there was notably minimal OS integration with Snapchat itself. I didn’t include it in my demo, but it looks like you can make calls through the glasses using Snapchat. ).
The enhanced interface and display quality are the first things that catch your eye when you put on the new Spectacles. Higher resolution and richer colors were present. Despite being largely stripped down, the Snap OS that powers the glasses has undergone a complete redesign and feels much more refined. Hand tracking and voice control are the primary navigation methods in Spectacles; while they occasionally felt sluggish, they never felt glitchy.
The 46-degree field of view on this model, up from 26.9 degrees on the previous version, and the 37 pixels per degree on its waveguide displays, according to Snap, are the appropriate measurements for gauging the quality of AR displays, which are approximately 25% richer than on the previous model. When you are outdoors, the physical lenses of the glasses automatically darken to let you see what is projected onto your surroundings.
The field of view was noticeably wider during my demo than it had been previously, but it was still far from what you would get from looking through a typical pair of glasses. A golf simulator I tried was limited to an annoyingly tiny portion of the real world around me, which is why Snap’s own demos emphasized this very confusing fact. Ultimately, because of its constrained field of vision, augmented reality is ultimately much less engaging than the actual world, which makes donning a pair of 226-gram smart glasses seem superfluous.
Snap has made significant investments to enhance the Spectacles’ hardware. The graphics are piped into the unique waveguides by two liquid crystal and silicon-based projectors on either side of the frame. With the help of a vapor chamber in each temple, two specially designed Qualcomm Snapdragon processors evenly distribute heat and power throughout the frames. Furthermore, the glasses are controlled by two infrared sensors that track hand movements to produce pull and pinch gestures reminiscent of Minority Report.
Throughout my demo, the fourth generation of Spectacles from 2021 overheated several times, but this most recent model never crashed—not even when I was wearing them outside amid Los Angeles’ record heat wave. From roughly 30 to 45 minutes on a single charge, according to Snap, the battery life has improved. Included is a USB-C cable that, when inserted into the temple of the glasses, enables continuous power.
Although Snap has some hazy ideas about what Spectacles should be used for, it’s obvious that developers will have to work out the majority of the possible use cases. Spiegel states, “We’re trying to be the most developer-friendly platform in the world,” but he doesn’t think Spectacles will be a significant business until the end of the decade. Although Snap won’t say how many pairs of these Spectacles it is producing, my sources estimate that there are about 10,000 in production. ).
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In 2016, Snap introduced the first set of Spectacles. Larger players, like Meta, have since indicated that they are also developing augmented reality glasses. Apple is working on them independently of the Vision Pro, and Google is collaborating with Magic Leap and Samsung to create AR glasses. “Sorry, so who of those have AR glasses?” is Spiegel’s simple response when I inquire about the increasing competition.
We aspire to be the world’s most developer-friendly platform.
He won’t have much more time to make this point. The much anticipated AR glasses prototype, code-named Orion, will be unveiled by Meta at its Connect conference the following week. They won’t be offered for sale commercially, just like spectacles. In the meantime, Meta’s collaboration with Ray-Ban on smart glasses has seen early success. It announced on Tuesday that it and Ray-Ban’s parent company, the massive eyewear company EssilorLuxottica, had signed a new 10-year agreement to produce smart glasses.
Ultimately, considering the lack of a market and the expense of obtaining a pair, I question why software developers would want to create apps for Spectacles at this time. Nevertheless, Spiegel thinks that a sufficient number of them will be inspired by the potential of AR glasses and eager to contribute to its development.
He claims, “I think it’s the same reason why developers were really excited about the early desktop computer or the early smartphone.”. These seem like a forward-thinking group of technologists who are quite enthusiastic about what lies ahead. “.
Spiegel might be accurate. Though the competition is intensifying, AR glasses might be the way of the future, and spectacles could be positioned to become the next big computing platform. But before Snap’s vision can be realized, a lot more work needs to be done.
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