>Every important computing platform has been defined by what people built with it. The PC became meaningful because developers built software. The web became meaningful because developers built websites. Smartphones became meaningful because developers built apps. We believe augmented reality will be no different.
At a $2195 price point, it just won't be possible to have an ecosystem. All the other platforms mentioned were orders of magnitude cheaper. That being said, I do think AR has real utility, but the price discovery will take a while
Apple sold over 500k (the last reported number) of Apple Vision Pros and they had/have a built in ecosystem and known developer tools.
It's been considered by all measures a flop. (I have one and love it).
Snapchat has a 2nd rate social media platform after a new audience, they already failed with hardware once, they lost all momentrum relative to their geo spatial ad filters and Lens make app (blew up during COVID).
I dont know convinces anyone that they are due for an Apple like moment in AR at $2k+ per glasses.
We didn't have early PCs when early PCs were expensive. Today we have desktops, laptop, smartphones, VR goggles, more PCs than you can shake a stick at, all reasonably priced. One more PC form factor isn't the same as when we were buying our first, or our second, or our third....
At AWE myself and I think the most interesting part of the announcement was how it came right AFTER talking about all of the tools available for porting existing AR experiences to the snap platform and tooling for building new lenses. Stark departure from Apple’s Vision Pro developer strategy, makes me far more likely to build something for it.
So.... this is weird... but in their video demo it has the address as "2772 State St" but the video was actually taken 100 State Street.... almost 16 blocks away.
Not only that but the augmented reality images have their "location" on the wrong corner.
I can understand not wanting to use a real restaurant (i guess?) but if you are faking literally everything then what is even the point of the demo? I sort of assumed it would be an overlay of video taken from the glasses along with the re-created output... but this just seems like they created the visuals after the fact to match the recorded glasses footage.
I think they're chasing the wrong dream. Most of the use cases they're proposing won't suffer much from being attached to a battery/processing puck, and in some cases being attached to a laptop. e.g. I'm not watching a movie while walking down the sidewalk. It would be nice to just sit on a comfy sofa someplace my laptop isn't and watch a movie, but not pay-an-extra-$1800 nice. especially when there are similar devices available where you could buy the device and a dedicated laptop to power it for less.
I think you need to shake up paradigms a bit in order to get true value from these glasses. You genuinely need to start viewing scene understanding abilities, frontier AI model API calls, and seamless hand tracking as core primitives that you combine thoughtfully and not new tech that you chain together hoping to land on a use case.
Now, the ecosystem and the engine so far were designed for lower stake experiences but to make the purchase of this device worthwhile for average users, they will need Vision Pro app depth of thinking and attention to detail while fitting into the far tighter software and hardware constraints.
So the key for them is to lower the skill ceiling so creatives can tap into more of the juice, which is why they've announced an Unity to Lens Studio bridge and closed loop agentic coding, while making it more attractive for seasoned developers to use their engine and push its capabilities(native c++ sdk).
It takes quite a lot, but from what I've seen over a year developing on their kit and watching their platform evolve, their strategy has sound fundamentals.
But they urgently need to tap into a broader and more diverse talent pool, like say Blender and Houdini artists, harware & robotics engineers, ML engineers, even music producers and sort of corral their attention into their platform long enough for truly novel and useful applications to emerge.
If you want both, you pay for both. If you only want movie watching, something like the XREALs will suit you better. If you want notifications in your face while your phone's in your pocket, and you want to watch that video while standing in line, then this is for you.
Adding to this: as much as I'm asking what smart glasses can do that a smartphone and tethered glasses can't, there's a second question here.
When the dumb display can also extend any other device you feel like, how is it more useful to have a dedicated set of frames with a dedicated operating system that you now have to care about?
Congrats to the Specs team for launch. Specs have come a long way since cimagine and looksery, spectacles days. And kudos to Snap for keep pushing.
- The price is actually competitive. They want to compete with Meta's Orion. However the product is ... lacking. None of the demos actually show-cased the dual wavelength display. The current usecases are available today at Meta Rayban Display for more cheaper and more polish.
- Dual snapdragon, and i assume one is dedicated to CV alg / scene-understanding/slam, without an external puck, i wonder how the thermal performance would look like.
- Looks very ugly, C'mon. This is the same team that desigend the original spectacle? where is Evan?
- I liked the Los Angeles text on the side. well-done.
I'm happy with my XReal one Pro.
Wired, dumb, no way to lock me into an ecosystem like when I bought Oculus Quest and then had to deal with Facebook's bullshit
Do the image quality/fov on those work well for working (terminal, reading documents, etc.)? I've only really seen people talk about watching movies and stuff on them.
"Our new waveguide uses billions of invisibly small nanostructures, so small that more than 10,000 can fit on the tip of a single hair. SPECS use the same advanced technology found in Boeing 787 Dreamliner windows, so the electrochromic lenses gently shift from clear to tinted in just 10 seconds."
This sounds slightly like Texas Instruments DLP (digital light processing) in that there's something actually physically moving. Does anyone have any more info about what this actually is?
Out of all the possible permutations of display/sensors/processing for AR, I would like to see eyewear with just a Bluetooth-like display and camera/mic. Let me use the phone or watch for all processing. Bonus points for eye tracking and body position sensors. Make the camera tethered if you must and somehow integrate it with my clothes.
Off course, this would mean less lock-in for everybody and we can't have that.
It takes time for older paradigms to be plodded through. I think the community is still sort of dizzy / dazzled from the novelty of the medium, and perhaps to some extent kept back by VR thinking and object/static 3d model type thinking.
As developers and users' Overton windows shifts, and they begin to think of these glasses as something totally normal and even quite boring, they might develop the orientation of mind necessary to hone in on use cases that properly _fit_ what this medium can offer.
It took me a year of confusion and throwing darts in the void before I finally began to see what this form of computing might represent. And that gain of clarity happened _thanks_ to deeply synergetic advancements in AI model capabilities and more recently with agentic coding which freed up the bandwidth to operate on higher level interaction and geometric primitives.
AR in isolation is nearly useless, but in conjunction with other domains and the environment it begins to make sense.
In my opinion, the ideal environment to nurture AR development looks a lot like Bret Victor's Seeing spaces. A lab, tools, devices, surfaces, combined with spontaneous, open-ended, and somewhat continual interaction and learning.
https://worrydream.com/SeeingSpaces/
The way forward is minimalistic smart hardware, like Meta's Raybans, until battery, optics and compute allow us truly miniaturized AR heasets. For now the price is too high and the utility too narrow to matter.
AR has yet to produce any value for anybody. Google failed, Apple failed, Meta basically built a creeper spy cam. These may be the most advanced devices to date, but hardware hasn't been the limitation for a long time. There's just no application that's more useful than just looking at your phone.
I think the biggest constraint so far has been on the computer vision side.
With a better processor, the glasses should be able to run real time 6dof object tracking, lower latency hand tracking potentially with better occlusion, and ideally OS-level subtle intent recognition since current air pinch based UI interactions will not make it into mainstream.
I'm curious though as to whether they've expanded the ONNX model compatibility. In my experience with the '24 dev kit, this was a serious blocking point in doing any serious custom CV work.
They've also announced a C++ native dev kit, as until now you could only use JS and TS withno node libraries. I think this specific update might have an outsized downstream impact on the ecosystem.
I think they're all trying to be a phone replacement, when I need them to be a smart watch replacement. Give me smart glasses and a ring that controls them. Give me simple, watch like actions, notifications, but keep them out of view.
They all want a new platform and lucrative app store, but glasses should be an accessory, like a smart watch as you noted. However, smart watches don't have lucrative app stores, so we get chonky, dorky looking faceware like this.
A few tech specs for those who don't want to read through the announcement:
* 51 degree field of view. Stated as being like you're working at a 24" monitor.
* 4 hours of mixed-use battery life with the case holding another 20 hours
* 132/136 grams depending on size
* Supports prescription lenses, easily interchangeable/swappable
Priced at $2195 w/ $200 deposit, arrival expected in Fall.
Tech specs for specs tech!
>Every important computing platform has been defined by what people built with it. The PC became meaningful because developers built software. The web became meaningful because developers built websites. Smartphones became meaningful because developers built apps. We believe augmented reality will be no different.
At a $2195 price point, it just won't be possible to have an ecosystem. All the other platforms mentioned were orders of magnitude cheaper. That being said, I do think AR has real utility, but the price discovery will take a while
Early PCs were VERY expensive at the time.
Apple sold over 500k (the last reported number) of Apple Vision Pros and they had/have a built in ecosystem and known developer tools.
It's been considered by all measures a flop. (I have one and love it).
Snapchat has a 2nd rate social media platform after a new audience, they already failed with hardware once, they lost all momentrum relative to their geo spatial ad filters and Lens make app (blew up during COVID).
I dont know convinces anyone that they are due for an Apple like moment in AR at $2k+ per glasses.
This is why VCs/PEs tend to not like founders.
Apple II is easy 5 figures today
$1,300 in 1977 is $7,450 today. Not quite 5 figures.
Close enough
We didn't have early PCs when early PCs were expensive. Today we have desktops, laptop, smartphones, VR goggles, more PCs than you can shake a stick at, all reasonably priced. One more PC form factor isn't the same as when we were buying our first, or our second, or our third....
Seeing augmented reality/technology/ads all day through my glasses sounds like a version of hell to me
Right. Other than people trying to sell us things, who thinks we should be trending towards being more online instead of less?
Makes me think of the short film HYPER-REALITY by Keiichi Matsuda: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs
At AWE myself and I think the most interesting part of the announcement was how it came right AFTER talking about all of the tools available for porting existing AR experiences to the snap platform and tooling for building new lenses. Stark departure from Apple’s Vision Pro developer strategy, makes me far more likely to build something for it.
So.... this is weird... but in their video demo it has the address as "2772 State St" but the video was actually taken 100 State Street.... almost 16 blocks away.
Not only that but the augmented reality images have their "location" on the wrong corner.
I can understand not wanting to use a real restaurant (i guess?) but if you are faking literally everything then what is even the point of the demo? I sort of assumed it would be an overlay of video taken from the glasses along with the re-created output... but this just seems like they created the visuals after the fact to match the recorded glasses footage.
Here is a link to their screenshot from the video: https://images.ctfassets.net/o1znirz7lzo4/4CwEXSX8icqDQAtDrD...
(Note: I would like to thank my years of delivering pizzas in Santa Barbara during college for the knowledge to debunk this video.)
I think they're chasing the wrong dream. Most of the use cases they're proposing won't suffer much from being attached to a battery/processing puck, and in some cases being attached to a laptop. e.g. I'm not watching a movie while walking down the sidewalk. It would be nice to just sit on a comfy sofa someplace my laptop isn't and watch a movie, but not pay-an-extra-$1800 nice. especially when there are similar devices available where you could buy the device and a dedicated laptop to power it for less.
I think you need to shake up paradigms a bit in order to get true value from these glasses. You genuinely need to start viewing scene understanding abilities, frontier AI model API calls, and seamless hand tracking as core primitives that you combine thoughtfully and not new tech that you chain together hoping to land on a use case.
Now, the ecosystem and the engine so far were designed for lower stake experiences but to make the purchase of this device worthwhile for average users, they will need Vision Pro app depth of thinking and attention to detail while fitting into the far tighter software and hardware constraints.
So the key for them is to lower the skill ceiling so creatives can tap into more of the juice, which is why they've announced an Unity to Lens Studio bridge and closed loop agentic coding, while making it more attractive for seasoned developers to use their engine and push its capabilities(native c++ sdk).
It takes quite a lot, but from what I've seen over a year developing on their kit and watching their platform evolve, their strategy has sound fundamentals. But they urgently need to tap into a broader and more diverse talent pool, like say Blender and Houdini artists, harware & robotics engineers, ML engineers, even music producers and sort of corral their attention into their platform long enough for truly novel and useful applications to emerge.
Additive display AR is not a good movie experience anyway.
If you want both, you pay for both. If you only want movie watching, something like the XREALs will suit you better. If you want notifications in your face while your phone's in your pocket, and you want to watch that video while standing in line, then this is for you.
I think the real question here is, how much of that can't you get with a device that just attaches to your phone via USB-C?
Adding to this: as much as I'm asking what smart glasses can do that a smartphone and tethered glasses can't, there's a second question here.
When the dumb display can also extend any other device you feel like, how is it more useful to have a dedicated set of frames with a dedicated operating system that you now have to care about?
> Today, SPECS are available for pre-order at SPECS.COM for $2,195, with a $200 refundable deposit.
Dayum.
I do buy into the AR glasses future. They’re insanely cool tech. Meta makes a great one.
Killer app: ad blocker for real life.
Congrats to the Specs team for launch. Specs have come a long way since cimagine and looksery, spectacles days. And kudos to Snap for keep pushing.
- The price is actually competitive. They want to compete with Meta's Orion. However the product is ... lacking. None of the demos actually show-cased the dual wavelength display. The current usecases are available today at Meta Rayban Display for more cheaper and more polish.
- Dual snapdragon, and i assume one is dedicated to CV alg / scene-understanding/slam, without an external puck, i wonder how the thermal performance would look like.
- Looks very ugly, C'mon. This is the same team that desigend the original spectacle? where is Evan?
- I liked the Los Angeles text on the side. well-done.
I'm happy with my XReal one Pro. Wired, dumb, no way to lock me into an ecosystem like when I bought Oculus Quest and then had to deal with Facebook's bullshit
Did I mention much cheaper?
Do the image quality/fov on those work well for working (terminal, reading documents, etc.)? I've only really seen people talk about watching movies and stuff on them.
Looks promising!
Easily beats the "screen extension" monitors you see at every coworking friendly cafe.
Something I've been meaning to ask with all these AR glasses: what do people who need glasses do to use these?
You can get prescription inlets for some of them, including these ones.
This but cut out a hole for the camera and <$50 https://www.skmproducts.com/product/original-tv-hat/ :^)
Specs will have more data collection and ads though
> The Original TV Hat works with portable media players, smartphones, Microsoft Zune, Apple iPhone, iPod touch and iPod nano.
See? It's possible to support older tech
they are expensive enough that they might be useful
"Our new waveguide uses billions of invisibly small nanostructures, so small that more than 10,000 can fit on the tip of a single hair. SPECS use the same advanced technology found in Boeing 787 Dreamliner windows, so the electrochromic lenses gently shift from clear to tinted in just 10 seconds."
This sounds slightly like Texas Instruments DLP (digital light processing) in that there's something actually physically moving. Does anyone have any more info about what this actually is?
This actually might work.
Out of all the possible permutations of display/sensors/processing for AR, I would like to see eyewear with just a Bluetooth-like display and camera/mic. Let me use the phone or watch for all processing. Bonus points for eye tracking and body position sensors. Make the camera tethered if you must and somehow integrate it with my clothes.
Off course, this would mean less lock-in for everybody and we can't have that.
lol
Gotta love that no matter how much the hardware advances, the optimistic, advertised abilities of AR have significantly reduced over time.
4 hours of use. To what, do turn by turn navigation? Play that stupid game that's just an escape room but poorly implemented?
Is that really all you offer?
It takes time for older paradigms to be plodded through. I think the community is still sort of dizzy / dazzled from the novelty of the medium, and perhaps to some extent kept back by VR thinking and object/static 3d model type thinking. As developers and users' Overton windows shifts, and they begin to think of these glasses as something totally normal and even quite boring, they might develop the orientation of mind necessary to hone in on use cases that properly _fit_ what this medium can offer.
It took me a year of confusion and throwing darts in the void before I finally began to see what this form of computing might represent. And that gain of clarity happened _thanks_ to deeply synergetic advancements in AI model capabilities and more recently with agentic coding which freed up the bandwidth to operate on higher level interaction and geometric primitives.
AR in isolation is nearly useless, but in conjunction with other domains and the environment it begins to make sense.
In my opinion, the ideal environment to nurture AR development looks a lot like Bret Victor's Seeing spaces. A lab, tools, devices, surfaces, combined with spontaneous, open-ended, and somewhat continual interaction and learning. https://worrydream.com/SeeingSpaces/
The way forward is minimalistic smart hardware, like Meta's Raybans, until battery, optics and compute allow us truly miniaturized AR heasets. For now the price is too high and the utility too narrow to matter.
as always, the ugliest frame possible.
AR has yet to produce any value for anybody. Google failed, Apple failed, Meta basically built a creeper spy cam. These may be the most advanced devices to date, but hardware hasn't been the limitation for a long time. There's just no application that's more useful than just looking at your phone.
I think the biggest constraint so far has been on the computer vision side. With a better processor, the glasses should be able to run real time 6dof object tracking, lower latency hand tracking potentially with better occlusion, and ideally OS-level subtle intent recognition since current air pinch based UI interactions will not make it into mainstream. I'm curious though as to whether they've expanded the ONNX model compatibility. In my experience with the '24 dev kit, this was a serious blocking point in doing any serious custom CV work.
They've also announced a C++ native dev kit, as until now you could only use JS and TS withno node libraries. I think this specific update might have an outsized downstream impact on the ecosystem.
I think they're all trying to be a phone replacement, when I need them to be a smart watch replacement. Give me smart glasses and a ring that controls them. Give me simple, watch like actions, notifications, but keep them out of view.
They all want a new platform and lucrative app store, but glasses should be an accessory, like a smart watch as you noted. However, smart watches don't have lucrative app stores, so we get chonky, dorky looking faceware like this.
Also, they definitely want to eventually be able to show ads