GoKawiilMy favorite part of wearing the Specs, Snap’s new augmented reality glasses, was playing dominoes. Sitting across the table from a Snap employee wearing the same pair of chunky glasses, I could select a virtual domino with a pinch and then move my hand to drop it in place, watching the tile snap down in front of us on a real table. It was unlike anything I’ve tried in other VR headsets or smart glasses — the ability to sit with another person and have a shared digital experience.
Snap really believes in AR glasses. The company has spent more than half a decade developing the technology, producing two generations of glasses that only ever shipped to a small number of developers. The company seems to want to untether itself from the limitations of being just one app in a big store and instead pioneer the next great platform.
Now, Snap is nearly ready to launch its first pair of AR glasses for consumers, the Specs, sometime this fall. That suggests Snap thinks these meet its vision well enough for regular people to enjoy using the $2,195 glasses. They’re certainly full of big ideas. But after an afternoon of testing at Snap’s offices this week, I’m skeptical of whether they’ll be fully ready for primetime.
Photo: Naohmi Monroe / The Verge
The Specs are big, black, bold glasses that come in two lens sizes, 47mm and 52mm. Part of why they’re so bold is almost certainly to make a statement — there’s no mistaking these for a regular pair of glasses, like you might with Meta’s Ray-Bans. (They’re a little too conspicuous for me personally; my glasses style is squarely “Elder Millennial Who Shops At Warby Parker.”) But they’re also so chunky because they house all the hardware necessary to let the Specs function as a standalone computer, meaning they don’t need to be tethered to a phone, compute puck, or external battery.
They may be chunky, but the Specs aren’t quite as heavy as they look. They’re heavier than my Warby Parker glasses, of course, which I can comfortably wear for most of the day. But the Specs didn’t drag on my face like a full-on VR headset. The Specs felt sturdy, too: I shook my head around and they didn’t fall off or even really slip. I wouldn’t suggest playing pickup basketball in these, but they’ll stay on your face while walking around. They made my ears sag just a little, though. And I wasn’t able to use the Specs enough to tell you if they’d start to feel uncomfortable over the course of a full four-hour battery cycle.
Actually using the Specs is kind of like using a hybrid of smart glasses and a VR headset. In front of your eyes, you can see menus, app windows, and elements of whatever app (“lens”) you’re using, like the digital dominoes. Those elements appear over whatever you’re looking at with your eyes through the lenses of the glasses, which have waveguide displays that can show “16 million colors” and “sharp, high-resolution visuals” (Snap hasn’t specified the exact resolution).
Thanks to hand-tracking tech in the Specs, you can pinch and drag to manipulate parts of the interface, such as resizing a window or moving a domino onto the game board, and Snap says you can even snap your fingers to take a picture in the Specs’ Snapchat app. Clever. You can also have windows follow along as you move your head, in case you want to keep a window in your vision no matter where you’re looking. You can access a home button, a Control Center-like menu, and status information like the time by holding up your palm in a setup that reminds me of the ill-fated Humane Pin.
In my limited testing, it was all rather finicky. I often had to pinch a few times or make sure my hand was placed in just the right spot to get something to work the way it should. I never quite nailed the two-part action of flipping my hand up and then using my other hand to press the home button. While standing in the sun, it was much harder to see the augmented reality graphics.
Snap has beaten competitors like Meta to shipping a pair of glasses with displays in both lenses, letting it deliver a true AR effect and not just another flat screen. But by putting the AR display dead center in your vision, the Specs’ 51-degree field of view becomes a major limitation. It meant that digital elements kept slipping out of sight during my demos, which ruined the illusion that they were actually in the real world. While watching Lanterns on HBO Max in a browser in a moving car, I had to shrink the window to make it easier to see in front of me. While playing dominoes, I had to keep physically turning my head to see my dominoes and the playing board and back again.
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