Snapchat Maker Impressively, Expensively Joins AR Glasses Race

The iPhone is not just the most important hardware product because it defined the smartphone, but because Apple both put firm controls on how other companies could get their tools onto it and added mandatory tolls on every payment. Apple has industry-leading hardware margins on the iPhone, but even more importantly, any time you pay for an app downloaded through the App Store, they take a 30 percent cut.The alternative, Android, isn’t much better for developers. You can install apps directly on Android phones without going through Google’s Play Store, but because of the convenience and security benefits, nobody does, so developers have to pay the Google tax as well.This is key to understanding the race to build augmented reality glasses — wearables that bring the utility of a smartphone into your vision. Meta, Apple, and Snap aren’t just competing to make what they think could be the replacement for the smartphone. They’re competing to see who will control the next generation of app stores, if smartglasses are the next form of mobile computing.But Snap, the independent social media company behind Snapchat, is in a more difficult position than Apple and Meta. It doesn’t have the same brand loyalty as Apple, which can sell the luxurious Vision Pro VR headset at an outrageous price, until they distill that experience into smart glasses within the next year. But they also don’t have the endless cash of Meta, which can sell its relatively inexpensive AI-enabled Wayfarers — fitted with speakers and cameras, but no screen, except on the most expensive new version — at or below cost.Meta RayBan Wayfarer. Courtesy of MetaApple Vision Pro. Courtesy of AppleTo compete in this space, it needs to make something that stands out from both Apple and Meta, isn’t dependent on brand cachet, and is sold with a margin. That’s a tough combination, and Snap revealed its answer yesterday with its new Specs.They’re a chunky, high-end, innovative pair of smart glasses that promise to bring the Vision Pro’s functionality and technology to the Wayfarers’ mobile form factor. But whether it succeeds as a product or is just an uncompelling worst-of-both-worlds will come down to the user experience and the software. Oh, and if people can bear the price.Specs. Courtesy of SnapTo explain the basics: they are a bulky pair of glasses, with chips, speakers, and cameras in each arm, and a display hidden within the lens itself — in essence, a tiny but highly detailed projector that beams the image through the glass. It’s technically impressive stuff: a proprietary liquid-crystal-on-silicon display with a 51-degree field of view, 16 million colors, and 7-millisecond latency. Snap says it feels like a 24-inch monitor or a 115-inch cinema screen — and the combination of visual fidelity and hyper-responsiveness would be unlike anything else with this form factor.Smaller, cheaper smart glasses like Even Realities’ G1 use a dot-matrix display, which is quick and comfortable to view, but basic. Xreal’s glasses display a static screen in midair, which is detailed but locked to your head as you move. The screen blocks out the world rather than sitting within it, and every time I’ve used Xreal products, they’ve made me feel nauseous, something even modern VR headsets have never done.In the demo videos, someone wearing Specs is watching a TV show on a projected screen that appears fixed in physical space. Other demos showed the software augmenting the real world, with instructional overlays for golf, drumming, and car maintenance, and map directions at the top of your vision. They have a four-hour “mixed-use” charge, which will certainly be too optimistic, but if you’re sitting at a desk, you can magnetically attach a cable to the side that both charges the glasses and connects to a computer.When you do so, you can put your computer’s output onto a digital display in the glasses, and no one looking at the glasses can ever see what software you’re looking at.The Specs are also a fully independent device. With two Snapdragon processors — one for the onboard AI, which can respond to questions about what you’re looking at, and another for operating the software — they don’t need to be tethered to a phone or computer.These features look great in Snap’s demo, but what matters is what they look like in reality. In Snap’s examples, despite sitting on a transparent display, the projected “screens” — showing TikTok or TV — are opaque, blocking what’s behind them. But is that how they will look? And will Snap make a cover for them so you can use them in full blackout mode as a personal cinema? Though Snap didn’t show how dark they get, the lenses are electrochromic, meaning they can shift from clear to tinted in ten seconds.The other issue with the features is whether they are real or just examples of what Snap thinks could be built for the glasses. Snap has a range of features and APIs for developers, but whether developers take advantage of that will come down to whether the Specs actually sell. Two problems stand in the way of that. The first is the look. The glasses are relatively light — made from Swiss TR90 polymer, they are only 132 or 136 grams, depending on the size — but they’re chunky, with batteries in the back of the arms, meaning they sit and look awkward on the face. With a black tint, they might look a little more like the retro, oversized sunglasses they’re styled after.The other problem is the price: when they go on sale in the fall, they will cost $2,195. You can tell Snap knows that price is a problem because, during the unveiling event, some conspicuously vocal audience members cheered loudest right as Evan Spiegel, Snap’s chief executive, announced that price. If they didn’t, you presumably would have heard a widespread, audible gasp.

Snapchat Maker Impressively, Expensively Joins AR Glasses Race

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