Snap is rolling out its fifth generation of Spectacles — standalone AR glasses that enable use of Lenses to “experience the world together with friends.” The firm is also launching a Spectacles Developer Program, and at a rental fee of $99 per month, that’s who the devices are aimed at, for now. Spectacles are powered by Snap OS, optimized to leverage people’s natural responses to interacting with their environment. They work seamlessly with mobile devices, turning smartphones into custom game controllers with Lenses. There’s even a Spectator Mode, “so friends without Spectacles can follow along, mirror your phone screen, and more.”

“The new fifth generation Snap Spectacles offer a wider field of view, longer battery life, a more powerful processor, and higher transparency to allow bystanders to see the wearer’s eyes,” UploadVR writes, citing Snap’s claim of a 46-degree diagonal field of view (up from 26.3 degrees for the previous version). That’s “slightly below HoloLens 2 and Xreal,” according to UploadVR.

Its waveguide displays show 37 pixels per degree, which Snaps says represents a 25 percent increase in the richness of the AR display.

The AR Spectacles are “less than half the weight of a typical VR headset at only 226 grams,” Snap explains in a newsroom post. That’s just under 8 ounces, the heft of a medium-sized apple.

Spectacles are equipped with four cameras, reports The Verge, mentioning “two liquid crystal and silicon-based projectors on each side of the frame that pipe graphics into the custom waveguides,” which the company calls the Snap Spatial Engine. They enable what Snap says will be “seamless” hand tracking.

“The Snap Spatial Engine understands the world around you so that Lenses appear realistically in three dimensions,” writes UploadVR, noting “an astounding 13 millisecond motion-to-photon latency” that renders Lenses with “incredible accuracy, integrating them naturally into your environment.”

The dual system-on-a-chip architecture features two Qualcomm Snapdragon processors, each shouldering  half the workload. The system “enables more immersive experiences while reducing power consumption,” Snap says, promising “up to 45 minutes of continuous standalone runtime.”

While Snap has a few Spectacles application in mind, it is “clearly leaving most of the potential use cases up to developers to figure out,” The Verge writes, couching this rollout in B2B terms.

“Like Meta, Snap has been trying for years to break into consumer hardware,” notes CNBC, adding that “unlike Meta, Snap’s core online advertising business has been struggling. It’s unclear how much longer investors will stomach Snap’s hardware push.”

Related:
Meta Deepens Smart Glasses Push with Ray-Ban Maker EssilorLuxottica Deal, The Wall Street Journal, 9/17/24