I demoed the Snap Spectacles and an AR future is on the horizon

I demoed the 2024 Snap Spectacles at the 2024 Snapdragon Summit. I’m a huge fan of immersive experiences, especially if they include augmented reality (AR) or mixed reality (MR). The Snap Spectacles are a pair of AR glasses that show how fun AR can be and how this technology can enhance your life.

It’s worth noting that the fifth-generation Snap Spectacles offer a familiar glasses form factor but are far less fashionable than the AI-focused Ray-Ban Metas. The Spectacles sport a lot of advanced hardware, though, so that it can augment your reality. The glasses feature four cameras, two in the front and two below that allow for hand tracking. Surprisingly, there are two Qualcomm Snapdragon processors, one on each side — from my understanding, neither are the AR Gen processors that we’d expect to see in Qualcomm-powered glasses; however, Snap and Qualcomm wouldn’t specify. There are also stereo speakers, six microphone arrays and a 37-pixel per degree stereo waveguide display for high-quality visuals. With all that tech packed inside it makes sense that the Spectacles are bulkier than the Ray-Ban Metas.

Despite the larger size, I didn’t find them uncomfortable to wear. My demo was probably a little bit over 10 minutes long; however, who knows, perhaps after 30 minutes, I might find the glasses too cumbersome, but I can only speak to my experience. I wear glasses on the norm, so it was also cool that the Snap team could provide lens inserts so that I could see clearly with the Spectacles on. From my understanding, the lens inserts were only available for demo, and if you were to purchase the Spectacles, you’d give them your prescription, and they’d install the proper lens for you and your device. The Spectacles also have a dynamic display brightness function, which lets you turn the digital overlays on and off, which can turn your wearable into normal glasses. However, if you’re wearing something so bulky, I doubt you’d want to turn off the overlays and wear them like regular glasses.

Enough of the hardware, though; let’s talk about the fun parts of the demo.

After a reasonably quick setup process, I got to play with the Snap Spectacles and boy, it was an exciting experience. Firstly, no puck or controllers were needed to open the menu and control your Spectacles; you only need to raise your hand. Once raised, an AR overlay displays over your hand, and you can go into the menu and tap the different options to exit an application and return to it. A pinch motion can also control actions, which was easier to get used to than the Apple Vision Pro headset.

With the headset on, you can browse the web, play games, mirror your phone, generate 3D objects, watch videos, and talk to an AI assistant. This was probably the worst part of the experience, as I didn’t find the assistant to be all that good or valuable. Still, it was set to a demo account, and it seemed like it could generate responses based purely on Spectacle’s owner.  Skipping past that, one of the experiences I tried out allowed me to use my hands and shoot ‘flower power,’ which grew flowers and other plants wherever I aimed my hands. This was cool because the Spectacles understood different surfaces, and the plants would stick to each surface. Shooting them onto the walls caused some hanging plants, and shooting them on the ground caused plants to grow beneath my feet. The object permanence was fascinating as when I looked away to create more plants, the original plants were still there when I looked back.

Another perfect example was when my buddy Will Sattelberg (from Android Police) and I joined our demo experiences. Two different people wearing Spectacles can join a combined experience. When I joined the experience, Will drew the words.”Hi, Dean,” and I could see it on my end. Then, I could draw around his words, making fun rainbow-coloured lines spiralling around whatever he would write. It ended up being a cool collaboration, and it was fantastic how 3D the experience was. At one point, he also wrote “Snapdragon,” but when I read it from my angle, it was gibberish. I had to stand on the other side of the word to read it correctly. This made a lot of sense but made the experience feel much more immersive and realistic. To explain this further, imagine talking to someone via a Star Wars/Star Trek-like hologram. If you’re not talking to the hologram, you’d see the back of their head instead of their face. You’d have to look at it from the angle of the person the hologram is talking to to see their face. This 3D AR experience felt like that and showed how close we are to what was once Sci-Fi technology. I also tried a chess demo and a Beat Saber-like boxing game, and both were pretty fun.

The Snap Spectacles are currently only available via the Spectacles Developer Program, allowing developers to build, play and test out the glasses. There’s also a 12-month commitment with a monthly subscription that costs $99 (roughly $137 CAD). The Developer Program is only available in the U.S., but I’d keep my eyes peeled for an expansion.