Among the flood of smart glasses expected in the next couple of years, Snap is preparing its own new pair of Spectacles. CEO Evan Spiegel told me the new augmented reality glasses will be smaller than the thick, developer-focused set I've tried before. I stepped back into those developer Snap Spectacles glasses again recently to test-drive Snap OS 2.0, part of what the company is planning in advance of those glasses arriving.
What I realized is that Snap's pushing forward into territory that Meta and Google haven't fully entered yet, but will. And Snap's news is clearly trying to preempt Meta's expected reveal of display-enabled glasses with gesture controls this week.
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Snap is an interesting player in the AR glasses arena because, right now, it's pretty much the only one making a truly self-contained pair that can run a variety of 3D apps with hand-tracking controls. Spectacles in their developer version are rough-edged, and Snap doesn't even make prescription inserts that match my eyes, but the apps it runs feel sort of like what Apple's Vision Pro can do, shrunk way down. And developers are already using them a fair amount to workshop real-world outdoor AR experiences that other hardware can't do yet.
Snap's video of overlaying a gallery of videos into a room with Snap OS 2.0. On actual Spectacles, the field of view is a narrow fraction of this. Snap
Snap's upgraded OS has a better web browser, along with a gallery-viewing app for looking at video captures made on the glasses and an app to browse Snap's own vertical social videos and comments.
I tried all of those, but the experiences that surprised me were live translation, a generative AI assistive tool called Spotlight, and a surprise port of a fitness game called Synth Riders that I got to play.
Snap's Spectacles in their current form are weirdly bulky and have a limited vertical field of view that feels like projecting a phone screen in the air. They can't accommodate my prescription yet, either, so I had to make do with a step-down insert and squint a bit. But their hand-tracking and 3D spatial features feel, at best, like a mini version of the Quest 3 and Vision Pro.
There aren't any captures that can show off what I demoed that impressed me, but I'll explain them as best I can.
Snap's spectacles are designed entirely to overlay 3D experiences into your physical space. The lenses are transparent, but the effect feels more like VR-based mixed reality. Scott Stein/CNET
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