Snap Glasses AR: Exclusive details about Snap’s new AR glasses

This spatial awareness is essential for the whole augmented reality experience. Snap engineers have known this as well as anyone since the company was built seemingly shameless but technologically impressive Snapchat’s AR filters introduced big AR frameworks for phones like Apple and Google long before that. Does Snap’s AR technology fit the glasses well? Yes and no.

The glasses are a rigorous interpretation of the technology to “wear” themselves. When I tried it out in a spacious house in Silicon Valley in late April, wide-open frames blurred my face. I felt and heard my eyelashes exploding against the lentils like a mini-squeeze. Where Snap’s earlier glasses were playful, with round frames and colorful threads around the camera lens, these hard-angle specifications are a must. (My editor thought they looked pretty good in the selfie I sent him; personally, I would wear no more than a statement of Snap’s latest. thing.)

“Our vision was to create an expressive, thought-provoking device that was to maintain the lightweight shape of sunglasses,” Lauryn Morris, Snap’s product strategy manager, told me in a video call. Thinkable, sure — I’m still thinking of the best way to describe it — but with 4.7 ounces they’re more than double the weight of the standard Ray-Ban Wayfarers.

Weight is one of the many compensations for AR glasses; are josia with technology. The lenses are stereo color screens that automatically adjust the brightness, up to 2,000 nit. The image that appears in front of the user’s eyes is created by dual optical waveguides, and two RGB cameras are specified to capture the peripheral world. Add four built-in microphones for voice control, a pair of stereo speakers for spatial audio, and a right-touch touch keyboard to navigate the app interfaces. The glasses are capable of external tracking; this means that they will “see” your hands when you make gestures in the air and interpret their movements, but none of the older AR Lenses for glasses use this function.

Snap didn’t create these AR specifications from scratch (although, according to Spiegel, they were created a few years ago when the first glasses were being mapped). They are based on Qualcomm’s XR1 platform, a dedicated chip-on system, and a set of reference designs for “extended reality” glasses. Snap is referring to its custom Spatial Engine as a unique piece of technology to make software applications that combine all the location information absorbed by the glasses realistic.

But the commitments that all potential glasses make to these compensations that they make at this awkward stage of AR are part of the reality of augmented reality. The 26.3-degree diagonal view of the glasses is smaller than FOV on other top screens, such as the Magic Leap and Microsoft HoloLens, and the touch screen requires fine adjustment. Fortunately, there is also the option of voice control, which works when it works.

The battery of this developer device only lasts 30 minutes. The trunk designed by Snap is doubled as a portable charger, but good luck with it for more than 30 minutes: in the few hours I’ve worn the glasses, I’ve seen three warnings that the glasses have overheated. Also, there is no physical volume in the specs, so you’ll need to watch the Snap phone app to control the sound levels.