Snap unveiled new AR glasses, the fifth generation of Spectacles, which are a massive improvement over the fourth generation. Not that you’d know, both the fourth and fifth generation of glasses are aimed at developers only.
The Snap Spectacles 5 have a new design and are significantly chunkier at 226g, almost double the 134g that the 4th gen weighed. The battery life has been improved from 30 minutes to 45 minutes without external power.
The Liquid Crystal on Silicon (LCoS) micro-projectors and waveguides are the thing to focus on – they create an image with a 46° diagonal Field of View (FoV), which is a massive increase over the 26.3° FoV of the fourth generation. The image is sharper too with 37 pixels per degree, 25% more than the old one.
Snap isn’t offering details, but apparently, there are two Qualcomm chipsets that share the workload of Snap OS. This way power usage is reduced and there are titanium vapor chambers for cooling.
Snap OS and the Snap Spatial Engine promise an impressive 13 millisecond motion-to-photon latency. Basically, four cameras feed into the Qualcomm chips, which figure out how you have moved your head and render virtual 3D elements on top of the real world that you see through the glasses. And all of that takes just 13 milliseconds, which should be an imperceptible delay.
Additionally, the Snap Spatial Engine is responsible for tracking your hand movements so that you can interact with the virtual objects in your view. Snap OS also handles voice commands.
You can’t buy the Snap Spectacles 5. If you want a pair, you have to sign up for the developer program, which comes with a $99 a month fee for at least one year. Yes, you have to rent these AR glasses and the process of getting them in the first place isn’t easy, so we don’t expect any consumers to have Spectacles. To be fair, Snap is presenting these purely as developer-focused devices.
But why bother? You can use these to develop Lenses for Snapchat, but only a limited experience is possible with smartphones. This is more of a long-term play by Snap, which wants to be the leader of the AR market, as soon as that AR market starts to exist.
The company has partnered with some high-profile brands to create unique experiences using the updated Lens Studio and Snap OS. Lego is launching BRICKTACULAR, which allows you to build virtual Lego sets with your hands and voice. ILM Immersive by Lucasfilm promises to “connect you and your friends with the Star Wars Galaxy”. Niantic will be bringing Peridot and Scaniverse to the Spectacles. Wabisabi Games is launching some “capture the flag” type game. All of that sounds really cool, so it’s a shame that barely anyone will get to play these games.
The Spectacles can work with your smartphone – the companion app can turn the phone into a game controller, for example. It also has Spectator Mode, so people without Spectacles can see what you see through their phones. You can also mirror your phone’s screen on the glasses and more. Again, sounds super cool, but…
Anyway, here is the promo video for the new Snap Spectacles 5. As you will notice, Snap has a very poor opinion of people using VR goggles – maybe it’s mad that Meta will be launching its own smart glasses next week (and a new, cheaper Quest 3S goggles too).