Snap OS debuts with developer-friendly Spectacles 5 AR glasses

Snap, the company behind Snapchat, has today announced the fifth generation of its ‘Spectacles’ AR glasses. These new see-through, standalone AR glasses are designed to enable users to interact with ‘Lenses’ and experience the world in novel ways alongside friends.

The latest iteration of Spectacles is powered by Snap OS, an operating system crafted to enhance natural interactions with the world. The glasses are now available through Snap’s Spectacles Developer Program.

“Spectacles are the result of a decade of research and development to introduce hardware that breaks the bounds of screens and brings people together in the real world,” explained Snap.

The new Spectacles boast impressive hardware specifications. Weighing a mere 226 grams – less than half the weight of a typical VR headset – they incorporate four cameras that power the Snap Spatial Engine and enable seamless hand tracking.

At the heart of the glasses is Snap’s proprietary Optical Engine, featuring Liquid Crystal on Silicon (LCoS) micro-projectors and advanced waveguides. These components work in tandem to create vivid, sharp images with a 46-degree diagonal field of view and 37 pixel-per-degree resolution.

The glasses are powered by a dual system-on-a-chip architecture, utilising two Snapdragon processors from Qualcomm. This design enables more immersive experiences while reducing power consumption, delivering up to 45 minutes of continuous standalone runtime.

Snap OS, the bespoke operating system driving Spectacles, offers an interface that can be navigated using hand gestures and voice commands. The Snap Spatial Engine understands the surrounding environment, allowing Lenses to appear realistically in three dimensions with a motion-to-photon latency of just 13 milliseconds.

Snap wants more developers to wear Spectacles

To bolster developer uptake, Snap is introducing Spectacles with “no developer tax.” The company has also launched new tools to streamline the process of building and sharing Lenses.

Lens Studio 5.0, a rebuilt development environment, allows developers to quickly push projects to Spectacles. The new Spectacles Interaction Kit simplifies the creation of intuitive Lenses without the need to develop custom interaction systems from scratch.

The updated Lens Studio supports TypeScript and JavaScript, and includes improved version control tools for team-based development. SnapML facilitates the use of custom machine learning models directly in Lenses for object identification, tracking, and augmentation.

Snap has also announced a partnership with OpenAI to bring cloud-hosted multimodal AI models to Spectacles, which will provide developers with tools to add contextual understanding to their Spectacles experiences.

The Spectacles Developer Program is available in the US for $99 per month with a one-year commitment. This subscription provides access to Spectacles hardware and includes support from Snap to assist developers in realising their projects.

Several high-profile partners are already leveraging Lens Studio and Snap OS to create new Lenses for Spectacles. These include LEGO Group, which has launched BRICKTACULAR, an interactive AR game controlled by hand gestures and voice commands. ILM Immersive, Lucasfilm’s interactive studio, is developing Star Wars-themed experiences, while Niantic is bringing popular titles like Peridot and Scaniverse to the platform.

Snap’s latest offering promises to be a step forward in the quest to seamlessly blend digital experiences with the physical world. However, the success of Spectacles and Snap OS will largely depend on the creativity and innovation of the developer community.

See also: Unity scraps its ‘Runtime Fee’ following developer backlash

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Tags: ar, augmented reality, coding, Developers, gaming, lens studio, metaverse, programming, snap, snap lenses, snap os, snapchat, spectacles, virtual reality, vr