Snap’s latest augmented reality glasses feature a brand new — but still pretty big — design, a larger viewing area, and brand new software that supports full hand tracking capabilities. But the company is only making the fifth-generation glasses available to approved developers who are willing to subscribe for $99/month for a year to start.
It’s an unusual strategy, but Snap says it’s taking such an approach because developers, for now, are best positioned to understand the capabilities and limitations of augmented reality hardware. They’re also the most willing to take on an expensive subscription of $1,000+ to try their hand at the technology.
Developers, explains Sofia Domínguez, Snap’s director of AR platform, are AR’s biggest enthusiasts. They’re also the ones who will create the experiences that will eventually get the rest of Snapchat users excited for them, too. “This is not a prototype,” Domínguez told Engadget. “We have all the components. When the market is ready, we are ready to expand, but we want to do so thoughtfully and take developers with us.”
Snap gave me an early preview of the glasses ahead of its Partner Summit event, and the Spectacles don’t feel like prototypes like their first AR-enabled spectacles in 2021. The hardware and software are noticeably more powerful. The AR displays are sharper and more immersive, and they already support more than two dozen AR experiences, including some products from big names like Lego and Niantic (According to Snap, Star Wars developer Industrial Light & Motion also has a lens in the works.)
The Glasses
To put it bluntly, the glasses are huge. Almost ridiculously big. They’re noticeably wider than my face, and the arms stick out past the end of my head. A small adapter helped them fit more comfortably around my ears, but they still felt like they could slide off my face if I suddenly moved my head or bent down.
Still, the new frames look a bit more like actual glasses than the fourth-generation glasses, with a narrow, angular frame with dark lenses The design was. The new frames are made of thick black plastic and have transparent lenses that can turn black when you go outside, kind of like transition lenses.
The lenses feature Snap’s waveguide technology that enables their AR capabilities in conjunction with a “liquid crystal on silicon micro-projector.” 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 prevents the overheating problems that plagued their previous models. The change appears to be effective.
In my roughly one-hour demo, none of the glasses I tried heated up, though they were a little warm to the touch after prolonged use. (The fifth-generation glasses have a battery life of about 45 minutes, up from the fourth-generation model’s 30 minutes.)
Snap has also significantly improved the glasses’ AR capabilities. Projected AR content was crisp and bright. When I went outside into the sunlight, the lenses dimmed, but content was almost as vivid as when I was indoors. At a resolution of 37 pixels per degree, I couldn’t distinguish individual pixels or blurry borders like I do on some other AR hardware.
But the most noticeable improvement from Snap’s previous AR glasses is the larger viewing area. Snap says it has nearly tripled the field of view from its previous generation Spectacles, increasing the window of visible content to 46 degrees. Snap claims this is the equivalent of having a 100-inch display in the room with you, and my demo felt more immersive than anything I saw in 2021.
It’s not fully immersive, though. I still found myself looking around the room at times, looking for AR effects I knew were around me. At other points, I had to physically move around my space to see the full AR effect. For example, when I tried the human anatomy demo, which showed a life-size model of the human body and its various mechanisms, I couldn’t see the whole figure at once. I had to move my head up and down to see the upper and lower parts of the body.
Snap OS
The other big improvement in the latest Spectacles is the addition of full hand tracking capabilities. Snap completely redesigned the underlying software that operates the Spectacles, now called Snap OS, so the entire user interface is controlled with hand gestures and voice commands.
You can draw the main menu on the palm of one hand, much like Humane’s AI Pin and you simply tap on the corresponding icon to do things like close an app or go back to the Lens Explorer carousel. There are also pinch and tap gestures to launch lenses and interact with them. Although Snap still calls these experiences Lenses, they look and feel more like full-fledged apps than the AR lens effects found in the Snapchat app.