Snap has revealed their newest Spectacles augmented reality glasses, featuring a new look and a suite of new features. Chief among the upgrades the Spectacles 5 possess is hand-tracking support, allowing users to interact with the world around them via gestures and hand movements.
What’s the most interesting about Snap’s direction with their new device though has nothing to do with the design of the glasses, however, but instead their availability. The company is continuing to make their Spectacles line difficult to get, making them available only to app developers that the company has approved, for a year-long subscription at $99 per month. Developers wanting to get on board must apply through Lens Studio, and approval isn’t guaranteed.
The following was originally published August 28, 2024:
Snap, the company behind Snapchat and the short-lived Pixy drone, will reportedly be revealing the next iteration of their Spectacles line of smart glasses. While the original Spectacles, released in 2016, could record video directly to snapchat, Snap’s upcoming release will be their second attempt at full-fledged augmented reality glasses.
WATCH: Company developing “glass-free” augmented reality, targeting the auto industry
The Spectacles 4, which released in 2021, integrated augmented reality features in the form of several games and a solar system projection app, but was plagued with an extremely short battery life, and only released in extremely limited quantities. The Verge reports that Snap CEO Evan Spiegel will reveal the Spectacles 5 next month at the company’s Partner Summit, which come with several improvements over its predecessor, namely improved battery life and a wider field of view. It seems that Spectacles are destined to continue to be an extremely limited device, however, with the publication reporting that Snap plans on making “fewer than 10,000” of the AR glasses.
