Snap Reportedly Building New AR Spectacles To Be Launched Mid-September
The Verge is reporting that Snap is working on its fifth generation of Spectacles augmented reality glasses that are set to be unveiled on September 15th during the annual Partner Summit in Los Angeles by the company’s CEO Evan Spiegel.
The new Snap Spectacles will be its fifth generation and the second smart glasses from the company to include augmented reality capabilities. In the same month, Meta is also set to launch its first Augmented Reality glasses which are codenamed Orion at the company’s Connect conference this year.
This is the first time since 2021 that Snap is launching a generation of its Spectacles smart glasses. The first generation of the Spectacles was made in very limited quantities and was only available to a few creators and developers, many of whom leveraged their capabilities to build interesting applications that the hardware’s AR displays with Snapchat’s lenses.
Despite their comparatively small form factor, the last generation of the Spectacles glasses had several limitations. For instance, they had a very narrow field of view and their battery life was a mere 30 minutes. Compared to the first generation of the Spectacles smart glasses, they looked much bulkier and boxier. The first generation of the glasses was so slim and had such a small form factor that they looked like ordinary sunglasses.
Snap has now reportedly improved the underlying technology of the fifth-generation smart glasses. According to The Verge, the newest iteration of Spectacles now features a much wider field of view and longer battery life. However, Snap is still positioning them as a developer device rather than a mass-market AR device. The report states that each pair of fifth-generation Spectacles cost “thousands of dollars to build”, and this will have direct bearing on retail pricing. Snap is reportedly planning to build “fewer than 10,000” of these smart glasses so they will be a very rare commodity.
Should the report prove accurate, Snap will, certainly, still be in play in the XR hardware market that is increasingly being monopolized by the likes of Meta and ByteDance. The last major hardware effort from the company was the $250 Pixy selfie drone that was abandoned within four months of its launch in 2022. Early this year, the device was recalled over a battery fire incident.
https://virtualrealitytimes.com/2024/09/02/snap-reportedly-building-new-ar-spectacles-to-be-launched-mid-september/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=snap-reportedly-building-new-ar-spectacles-to-be-launched-mid-september
