Snap’s Next-Gen Spectacles Focus on Augmented Reality

The newest Spectacles product from Snapchat is going all-in on augmented reality. 

The glasses, introduced today, are designed to project digital images over the lenses, and thus overlay virtual objects onto your real-world surroundings. 

Past Spectacle products have mainly revolved around using cameras on the glasses to record video and images. This time, the product is being used build a bridge to AR effects, a growing feature on Snapchat.

However, the product won’t be sold to consumers, for now. Instead, the company has been making the glasses available to developers creating AR-based programs using Snap’s Lens Studio platform.

In several videos, the company demonstrated how developers envision creating programs for the glasses. One such program tries to gamify your exercise routine while cheering you on. Another program focuses on improving road trips; it’ll pull up virtual information about an area the moment the glasses view a historic road sign.  

Although the glasses won’t be available to the public, they do show that Snap has major ambitions to take AR mainstream. CEO Evan Spiegel demoed the product at Thursday’s Snap Partner Summit event, and showed the glasses can be used to create and play games.

This might include activating a virtual dog and throwing them a bone. With the glasses, you can then capture a picture of the scene and share it with friends over Snapchat.

The product itself runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR1 chipset to enable the AR experiences. The lenses can also dynamically adjust up to a brightness of 2,000 nits while offering a 480-by-564-pixel resolution.

Other features include a pair of RGB cameras capable of 1,920-by-1,440 video capture, four built-in microphones, two stereo speakers, a touchpad, and voice controls. In addition, the “Snap Spatial Engine” on the glasses can leverage six degrees of freedom and hand, marker, and surface tracking.

However, the hardware does have significant limitations. For example, the glasses can only run AR effects for about 30 minutes on a single charge. The field of view for the built-in display is also limited to 26.3 degrees. 

Interested developers can apply to use the next-generation Spectacles on the company’s website. The glasses weigh in at 134 grams or about 0.3 pounds.