Snap Glasses AR: Exclusive details about Snap’s new AR glasses

Spatial awareness is the foundation of the entire augmented reality experience.Since the establishment of the company, Snap engineers and anyone else have known this Seems cheeky, but technically impressive Snapchat’s AR filter predated the launch of its mobile AR framework by giants such as Apple and Google. Can Snap’s AR technology be ported to glasses well? Yes, not at all.

The glasses themselves are a vivid interpretation of “wearable” technology. When I tried on ultra-wide frames in a spacious house in Silicon Valley in late April, my face became dwarf. I feel and hear my eyelashes brushing on the lens like a small spatula. Where Snap’s earlier glasses are interesting, there are round frames and colorful frames around the camera lens. These hard-angle glasses are purposeful. (My editor thought they looked cool in the selfies I sent him; I personally would not wear them outside of Snap’s latest statement. thing)

Lauryn Morris, Snap’s product strategy manager, told me in a video call: “Our vision is to create an expressive, thought-provoking device that maintains the shape of lightweight sunglasses.” Of course, thought-provoking ideas-I’m still thinking about describing them. Their best method-but weighs 4.7 ounces, which is twice the weight of a standard Ray-Ban hiker.

Weight is one of the many tradeoffs of AR glasses.they are Packed And technology. The lens is a stereo color display that can automatically adjust the brightness up to 200 ​​0 nits. The image that appears in front of the wearer’s eyes is produced by a dual light waveguide, and two RGB cameras are built into the specification to capture the surrounding world. Plus four built-in microphones for voice control, a pair of stereo speakers for spatial audio, and a touchpad on the right temple for navigating the app interface. Glasses have the ability to track from the inside to the outside, which means they will “see” your hand and interpret its movements when gestures in the air, but none of the earliest AR apps for glasses took advantage of this feature.

Snap did not build these AR specifications from scratch (though according to Spiegel, they were conceived many years ago, when the first glasses were drawn). They are based on Qualcomm’s XR1 platform, a dedicated system-on-a-chip, and a series of reference designs for “extended reality” glasses. Snap claims that its customized spatial engine is a unique technology that combines all the positioning information absorbed by the glasses to give the application a realistic feel.

However, these trade-offs, which every eyewear manufacturer seems to make during the embarrassing stage of AR, are all part of augmented reality technology. The 26.3-degree diagonal field of view on the glasses is smaller than the FOV on other head-up displays (such as Magic Leap and Microsoft HoloLens), and the touchpad needs some fine-tuning. Fortunately, there is also a voice control option, which works well at work.

The battery on the developer device can only be used for 30 minutes. Snap’s well-designed carrying case doubles as a portable charger, but with luck, it lasts more than 30 minutes: in the short time I was wearing my glasses, I saw three warnings that the glasses were overheating. In addition, there are no physical volume buttons on the specifications, so you have to control the volume through the Snap smartphone app.