Fifth Generation Snap GlassesAccording to the company, it weighs 226 grams, sits lightly on the eyes and behaves just like normal glasses until you turn it on and it offers a screen on which you can enjoy or get creative with a variety of lenses.
Seeing the merits of AR glasses with big technology, which are different from opaque and bulky VR headsets, Snap is the first in this new category of wearable devices. Meta is believed to be ready to introduce its own AR Glasses Very.
Snap Glasses, which is a stand-alone device that can be operated with gestures from your right hand and a virtual console that opens in your left palm, works by projecting an overlapping AR image onto your view and doesn’t disconnect you from reality.
For example, if you’re sitting in your living room, you can wear the glasses and play a virtual game of chess on your real table – moving pieces with pinch gestures and making your moves on the virtual board – while drinking a (real) cup of coffee. You can see all three clearly – the table, the chess board and pieces, and the cup of coffee.
Snap describes the glasses as “the result of a decade of research and development, resulting in hardware that breaks the boundaries of screens and brings people together in the real world.”
The glasses can also be connected to a phone via Snap’s ‘Spectacles’ app, allowing the phone to be used as a game controller and even mirroring the phone’s screen. The ‘Spectator Mode’ feature allows for group activities with the glasses. For example, two players can play a game of chess if both players are wearing the glasses.
New AR glasses launched by Snap co-founder Evan Spiegel At the Santa Monica-based company’s main annual event, SNAP Partner Summitat the Barker Hangar in Los Angeles.
“Technology can be much better than it is today. We can’t be tied to screens all the time. We need something more intuitive, more human,” Spiegel said.
Snap has also announced a partnership with OpenAI that will open up artificial intelligence models for lens developers to create using the new AR glasses. As Spiegel said, “no tech event in 2024 would be complete without an OpenAI partnership”. Like the image-creating AI tool, its Easy Lens can also work to create lenses instantly.
At the summit, the company also announced that LEGO Games has launched ‘Bricktacular’ for these spectacles, as well as a partnership with Niantic, and a Star Wars Galaxy experience being created by Lucasfilm’s interactive studio ILM Immersive.
The company said that these glasses will currently be available only to lens developers, including developers in India, who will work with Snap on a monthly subscription of $99.
features
Snap AR glasses are equipped with four cameras that power the Snap Spatial Engine and enable hand tracking. The optical engine is designed to enable transparent AR displays.
The glasses work via liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS) micro-projectors that create vivid images, and have waveguides that make it possible to view images created by the LCoS projector without the need for calibration or custom fitting. The company said they have a motion-to-photon latency of 13 milliseconds that provides “incredible accuracy, making them integrate naturally into your environment”.
The optical engine provides a 46-degree diagonal field of view with 37 pixels per degree resolution — the same as a 100-inch display that’s 10 feet away. The glasses automatically change color based on the surrounding light and work both indoors and outdoors.
The dual system-on-a-chip architecture with two Snapdragon processors splits the compute workload across the glasses while titanium vapor chambers dissipate heat. The company announces up to 45 minutes of runtime on a single charge.
“We want to be the most developer-friendly platform in the world and empower developers to invest in building great lenses,” the company said in a statement. It also announced that there will be no developer tax on Glasses and developers will get new ways to create and share lenses. “Instead of a complicated compilation process, the redesigned Lens Studio 5.0 lets developers quickly push their projects onto Glasses,” the company said.
Simplified Snapchat
Snap also announced at the summit that it was testing “a new and simplified Snapchat that streamlines the app for communicating with friends, using the camera, and viewing Snaps from friends and the broader Snapchat community, including creators and publishers”.
“We’ve been working on integrating Stories and Spotlight for some time. Now, with this new and simplified design, Snapchatters will get a more personalized and relevant viewing experience,” it said.
