Snap has the latest augmented reality glasses brand new — but still very large — design, a brand new app that supports a wider field of view and full hand tracking capabilities. But the company only launches the fifth generation Glasses approved developers ready for a one-year subscription for $99 per month to get started.
It’s an unusual strategy, but Snap says it’s taking this approach because developers are still in the best position to understand the capabilities and limitations of augmented reality hardware. They are also the ones most willing to pay $1000+ premium subscriptions to get their hands on the technology.
Developers are the biggest AR fans, explains Sophia Dominguez, Snap’s AR platform director. They’ll also build experiences that will excite the rest of Snapchat’s users. “It’s not a prototype,” Dominguez told Engadget. “We have all the components. We’re ready to scale when the market is there, but we want to do it thoughtfully and bring developers along for the ride.”
Snap gave me a preview of the Glasses before the Partner Summit event, and the Glasses don’t feel like the first AR-enabled Glasses prototype. in 2021. The hardware and software are quite powerful. AR displays are sharper and more immersive, and they already support two dozen AR experiences, including several from big names like Lego and Niantic.Star Wars Developer Industrial Light and Motion also has the lens, according to Snap.)
Glasses
As you can see, glasses are massive. It’s almost comically huge. They are much wider than my face and my arms are stretched over the top of my head. A small adapter helped them fit more comfortably in my ears, but they still felt like they could slide off my face if I suddenly shook my head or bent down.
Still, the new frames look a bit more like real glasses than the fourth-generation Spectacles, with a narrow, angular design with dark lenses. The new frames are made of thick black plastic and have clear lenses that can darken when you’re out and about, like transition lenses.
The lenses feature Snap’s waveguide technology, along with “Liquid Crystal on Silicon Micro-Projectors” that enable their AR capabilities. Each pair is also equipped with cameras, microphones and speakers.
Inside each arm is a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. Snap says the dual processor setup has made the glasses more efficient and avoids the overheating issues that plagued its predecessor. The change seems effective. None of the Glasses I tested got hot during my roughly hour-long demo, although they were a bit warm to the touch after prolonged use. (The fifth-generation Spectacles have a battery life of about 45 minutes, and the fourth-generation model has a battery life of 30 minutes.)
Snap has also greatly improved Spectacles’ AR capabilities. Projected AR content was sharp and bright. When I was outside in the sun, the lenses darkened, but the content was almost as vivid as when I was inside. With a resolution of 37 pixels per degree, I couldn’t distinguish individual pixels or fuzzy boundaries like I can with some other AR devices.
But the most noticeable improvement from Snap’s latest AR glasses is the wider field of view. Snap says it has increased the window of visible content to 46 degrees, almost tripling the field of view from the previous generation of Glasses. Snap claims it’s the equivalent of having a 100-inch screen in the room with you, and the demo felt significantly more impressive than anything I’ve seen in 2021.
However, it’s not completely immersive. I still occasionally looked around the room looking for AR effects that I knew were around me. At other times, I had to physically move around my space to see the full AR effects. For example, when I tested the human anatomy demo, which shows a life-size model of the human body and its various systems, I couldn’t see all the figures at once. I had to move my head up and down to see the upper and lower parts of the body.
Snap OS
Another big improvement in the latest Glasses is the addition of full hand tracking capabilities. Snap has completely redesigned the core software that powers the Glasses, now called Snap OS, so the entire user interface is controlled by hand gestures and voice commands.
You can bring up the main menu in the palm of one hand, like Humane’s AI Pin, and simply tap the appropriate icon to do things like close the app or return to the lens explorer carousel. There are also pinch and touch gestures to activate and interact with the lenses. While Snap still calls these experiences lenses, they look and feel more like full-fledged apps than the AR lens effects you’ll find in the Snapchat app.
Lego has a game that allows you to pick up bricks with your hands and build things. I also tried the mini golf game where you put a golf ball on an AR course. Niantic has created an AR version of the tamagotchi-like character Peridot that you can place around you.
You can also interact with MyAI, Snapchat’s generative artificial intelligence assistant, or “feedback” the space around you with AR effects. Some experiences are collaborative, so if two people with Glasses are in the same room together, they can view and interact with the same AR content together. If you only have one pair of Glasses, other people around you can see what you’re seeing through the Glasses mobile app. It lets you stream your view to your phone, a bit like how you might stream VR content from a headset to a TV.
The new gesture-based interface felt surprisingly intuitive. I sometimes struggled with lenses that required more precise movements like picking up and placing individual Lego bricks, but the software never felt buggy or unresponsive.
There are even more interesting use cases in the works. Snap is again partnering with OpenAI so developers can create multimodal experiences for Spectacles. “Very soon, developers will be able to bring their own software [OpenAI] models into the Glasses experience so we can really rely on more utilitarian, camera-based experiences,” Dominguez says. “These AI models can help give developers and ultimately their end customers more context about what they’re seeing, hearing and seeing.”
Is AR hardware having a moment?
CEO Evan Spiegel has spent years extolling the promise of AR glasses, which have long felt out of reach. But if the company’s 2021 Glasses showed that AR glasses are finally possible, fifth-generation Glasses feel like Snap could finally be getting closer to making AR hardware that isn’t just an experience.
There are still some significant limitations. The glasses are still large and somewhat inconvenient. Even though the fifth generation Glasses look like regular glasses to a passing degree, it is difficult to imagine walking around with them in public.
Still, that may not matter as much to the people Snap wants to reach the most. As virtual and mixed reality become more common, people have become more willing to wear proper headgear in public. People wear Apple Vision Pro headphones on airplanes, in coffee shops, and in other public places. As Snap points out, its Glasses, at least, don’t cover your entire face or hide your eyes. And Dominguz says the company expects its equipment to shrink over time.
But the company will likely have to find a way to lower the price of the Glasses. It is said that each pair is expensive thousands of dollars to produce, which helps explain Snap’s current insistence on a subscription model, but it’s hard to imagine even die-hard AR enthusiasts shelling out more than a thousand dollars for glasses with less than an hour of battery life.
Snap seems to be well aware of this, too. The company has always made it clear that it plays the long game when it comes to AR, and that mindset hasn’t changed. Dominguez has repeatedly said that the company is intentionally starting with developers because they are the “most ready” for a device like fifth-generation Glasses, and that Snap intends to be ready when the consumer market matures.
The company is also not alone in finally making AR hardware a reality. By all accounts, Meta is set to unveil the first version of its long-promised augmented reality glasses at next week’s developer event. Its glasses, known as Orion, are also unlikely to go on sale anytime soon. But Meta’s focus on the space could benefit Snap as it tries to sell its vision for an AR-enabled world.
