New Spectacles from Snap – AR glasses with AI functions

Snap is launching the 5th generation of Spectacles. The AR glasses were previously only available to selected developers, but at least in the USA you can now subscribe to them for 99 US dollars a month. In Germany, you still have to wait. The Spectacles are equipped with AI and their range of functions lies between Meta's Ray Ban Smart Glasses and large VR glasses such as the Apple Vision Pro. However, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said at the Snap Summit that he wasn't talking about virtual reality headsets, he was talking about glasses. "VR headsets are like holding a laptop in front of your face."

However, unlike Meta's smart glasses, the Spectacles are initially a standalone device. The glasses do not need to be connected to a smartphone. Spectacles have their own newly created operating system called SnapOS. However, you can connect the AR glasses to a smartphone – and then use it as a controller, for example. Basically, the glasses can be controlled using your hands or voice. Thanks to so-called wave guides on the lenses, you can keep an eye on your surroundings while other elements are displayed.

Hand tracking for the Spectacles

Snap focuses on the use of lenses, i.e. filters that are placed over the camera. People interact with these within Snapchat. They send funny photos and videos of themselves and their surroundings. The lenses can now also be transferred to the environment in front of your own eyes in real time via the glasses. There is a new game for the Spectacles from Lego: Bricktacular is controlled with your hands and voice. ILM Immersive, the interactive studio from Lucasfilm, and the game developers Niantic and Wabisabi Games are also already on board.

The glasses themselves weigh 226 grams. In comparison, the Ray Ban Meta Smart Glasses only weigh around 50 grams, while an Apple Vision Pro weighs more than 600 grams. Four integrated cameras should make seamless hand tracking possible. Apple has twelve cameras, while Meta's smart glasses have no hand tracking at all. According to Snap, the Spectacles' optical engine has been specially developed. It provides a diagonal field of view of 46 degrees with a resolution of 37 pixels per degree. "The new Spectacles' impressively small yet powerful Liquid Crystal on Silicon (LCoS) Mirco projectors produce vivid and sharp images," according to the Snap Summit. The glasses can adapt to the lighting conditions, meaning you can see equally well in sunny or cloudy conditions.

Two Snapdragon processors from Qualcomm ensure a runtime of 45 minutes in standalone mode, among other things. The motion photon latency, i.e. the time it takes the device to implement a movement, is 13 milliseconds.

Developers can create and offer Lenses for the Spectacles without having to pay a fee. The developer studio Lens Studio has also been upgraded to version 5.0. This also includes a partnership with OpenAI. However, it is not yet entirely clear what exactly this will look like. It is said that the Spectacles will be "equipped with the possibilities of cloud-hosted multimodal AI models".

(emw)