Snap is pitching its new augmented reality glasses as a fun way for you to feel closer to your friends. If only the shades looked a little more friendly themselves.

The Santa Monica, California company debuted its first model of Snap Spectacles in 2016. They were brightly colored circular frames that focused primarily on shooting photos and video, which were captured as wide-angled circles that evoked the sort of fun, anarchic energy of a skateboarding video. They didn’t have any augmented reality features at all, and were more akin to early Meta Ray Bans. Crucially, the Snapchat Spectacles were fun, trendy (depending on your style) glasses that looked far more like real, fashionable sunglasses than the typically monstrous smart glasses: rectangular head ornaments, or the dorky and oft-mocked Google Glass.

Snap released a few more versions of its circular Spectacles, but in 2021 its ambitions shifted in an effort to incorporate augmented reality—images, words, and graphics projected into your field of view so the visuals seem to hover right in front of you. Snap’s AR-enabled Spectacles traded the whimsical, teen-friendly aesthetic for a black, sharp-angled rectangular look that would fit right into a cyberpunk ‘80s movie.

The ‘24 edition of the Spectacles continue that Balenciaga chic, albeit with smoother curves that make them only slightly less blocky and obtuse than the previous version. Also like the 2021 glasses, these Spectacles are not technically on sale to the general public. The 2024 Specs do have a price tag and you can pay to use them, but the cost is hefty and you have to jump through some hoops. To get access to the Spectacles, you have to join Snap’s developer program, which costs $99 per month and requires a year-long commitment. The program is aimed at developers looking to make apps for the platform and priced accordingly, so normies who want to wear them on the street will likely get turned off from signing up.

“Our vision has always been to bring the power and joy of augmented reality to people everywhere, and our newest pair of Spectacles is one step closer to making that vision a reality,” Scott Myers, vice president of hardware engineering at Snap, wrote in an email to WIRED. “We’re starting with developers who share our vision for overlaying computing onto the real world and want to build that future together.”

Snap announced these new Spectacles in September, just a few days before Meta unveiled its rival Orion glasses. Both are primarily marketed at developers and will have limited distribution. Both pairs of glasses look similar. The Orion frames are slimmer, sure, but both models are bulky black face obelisks that are unlikely to become a popular fashion item. Which is probably why they look so austere. They’re not really for you. Not yet.

Snap hasn’t provided a timeline for how that development may go, but it also isn’t just going to wait around until an ecosystem develops. Snap is also aiming its marketing at its core users, eager to eventually ease out of the development phase and reach a wider audience that want to connect with friends and use the glasses for creative collaboration.

Snap’s Spectacles web page lets Snapchat users try on a virtual pair of the glasses and encourages them to play and learn together with Specs “Designed to get more people, closer over the things they love, together.”

Like Meta’s Orion, it will likely take years for the AR glasses to shape up. But the race is on, and Snap is hoping to get its Specs on people’s faces as fast as it can, even if casual users might not be all that interested in wearing them yet.

Face Time

I got the chance to try the new Spectacles in a hotel room overlooking the San Francisco Bay. Snap gave me the demo on background, meaning I wasn’t able to quote anyone in the room. But I was able to take a sweet selfie so you can see how rad I look wearing them.

The first thing I noticed about the Spectacles is that they’re big. They weigh 7.97 ounces, or just under half a pound. That isn’t much, but the weight still wears on your ears and bridge of your nose after a while with Specs on. The good news is that you won’t have to wear them for long, as the battery only lasts for 45 minutes of continuous use. They might be a big, questionable fashion choice, but the Spectacles fit on the face rather well if you can get past the goofy look.

The glasses work both indoors and outdoors, which the Snap folks showed me by letting me wander outside to take photos of the San Francisco Ferry building with the Spectacles by using a voice command. The display is sharp and vivid, even outdoors, meaning I could read text or see visuals just fine in the sunlight. The display renders at a resolution of 37 pixels per degree, which is very high for a digital image. It exceeds the PPD of Meta’s Orion glasses, which are currently rated at 13 PPD, with Meta’s stated goal of getting to 30 PPD. (The human eye can register real-world details at about 60 PPD.)

The only problem is that the Spectacle’s display window for the augmented features—text, games, holographic overlays—only takes up 46 degrees of your field of vision. That’s three times the width of Snap’s previous AR glasses, so it’s a step forward for Snap. But the company’s optics are bested by competitors. The Spectacles’ 46-degree field of view is slightly less than the 52-degree view in Microsoft’s now-discontinued Hololens 2, but much less than the Orion’s 70-degree field of view.

What that means is that while you can see the rest of the real world like you would through a pair of normal glasses, the augmented elements only come through in a rectangular window right in the middle of your vision. That limits the digital overlay to a block in the middle of the screen, just wide enough to cover, say, a sidewalk if you’re walking down the street. It works just fine with AR features like text that stays in the window and moves with you. But if there are fixed AR elements in a world, the augmented view only extends to where your peripheral vision starts. Move your head around and the images will get cut off when they reach the edges of the AR window.

There are microphoness to register your voice commands. Forward-facing cameras on the outer rim of the Spectacles control the stuff on the translucent screen and track your hands. There are no hardware hand controllers, you just hold your hands up in the air to make pinch and pull gestures with your fingers. The distances for those controls aren’t super consistent from app to app. Sometimes you have to reach way out in front of you to pop a bubble, sometimes you have to pinch while holding your hand right next to your face. It takes a while to get the hang of normal interactions because of these changes in distances, which vary between the different apps depending on how each one was developed.

Snap really wants its Spectacles to do what Snapchat does best: let people share stuff. The Spectacles don’t seamlessly connect to Snapchat the service yet, though there are a few features that carry over. MyAI, Snapchat’s AI chatbot feature, lets you use voice commands and pics snapped by the outward-facing camera to ask questions about your surroundings and get immediate answers and links to sites like Wikipedia that might offer more information at the bridge you’re looking at. Video Calling Lens lets you call people through Snapchat, then lets them see what you are seeing through your Spectacles. Bitmoji also carry over, identifying you as your character in settings and AI interactions.

“Snapchatters have been using AR since 2015,” Myers says, “and because of that, we believe their transition to wearing AR glasses will be seamless.”

Snap is also positioning the Spectacles as devices that let people interact in person too. At one point in my demo, all four of us in the room (two Snap employees, a third-party developer, and me) put on a pair of Spectacles and joined a shared fingerpainting room. We used our fingers to paint shapes and lines in the air in front of us. One of the reps drew a portal in the door. Another challenged me to a brightly colored game of Tic-Tac-Toe floating in the air between us. I tried to draw a big cool S but failed, just like I did in middle school. It was a nice moment, and one that hints at how Snap wants its devices to serve as a shared platform people can creatively build on when they’re together in the real world. It was also just people standing around and doodling, which we have been doing since the dawn of time.

“People want to connect with those they're closest to,” Myers says. “That’s why Snapchat is centered around communicating with your real friends and staying grounded in the real world. “

Heat Vision

All this computation uses up energy, which generates heat. Inside the arms of the glasses is a vapor chamber—a miniature cooling system that disperses the heat away from the processors and across the arms of the glasses. This helps keep the chips inside the frame from getting hot against your temples, but it does also mean the heat spreads to the parts of the arms that are touching your head. I wore the glasses for about 45 minutes and when I removed them, the arms felt warm to the touch and I had started to sweat a little around my temples. (Note: I sweat very easily, your glandular output may vary.) It is not an unpleasant amount of warmth, and it’s manageable if the battery is going to max out at 45 minutes anyway. But the Specs do heat up. Maybe Snap could market them as ear warmers.

At a demo, one game developer showed me a game his company built for the Spectacles. It tracks how far you walk and overlays a gamified grid over the top of your surroundings. As you walk, you collect coins that add up over your route. RPG-style enemies will pop up occasionally too, which you can then fight off with an AR sword that you wield by waving your hand around in real life. You have to hold the sword out directly in front of you in order to keep it within the confines of that narrow field of view, though, so that means walking with a stiff, outstretched arm. The pitch is that you can play this game while walking, which seems to me like a good way to accidentally whack somebody else walking on the sidewalk or get hurt when you chase a coin into traffic.

Snap encourages wearers to avoid using AR that blocks their vision at times when they shouldn't be distracted, and to pay attention to their surroundings. But there are no procedures in place on the Spectacles now that send a pop up warning when something is in the way, or prevent people from using the glasses while driving or operating heavy machinery.

People have been grievously injured while distractedly playing Pokémon Go, but Snap says this is a different use case. Holding your phones directly in front of you to catch a rare Snorlax is a problem because then you’re blocking your vision with a device. The Spectacles let you see the real world at all times, even through the augmented images in front of you. That said, I found that having a hologram in the middle of my vision can definitely be a distraction. When I tried out the walking game, my eyes focused more on the little cartoon collectibles floating around than the actual ground ahead of me.

This might not be a problem while the Specs are solely at the hands of a few developers. But Snap is moving quickly, and also wants to appeal to a wider array of buyers, likely in an effort to build up its tech before its rivals can run away with the AR prize.

After all, Meta’s AR efforts seem to be further along than Snap—lighter frames, more robust AI on the backend, and ever-so-slightly less of an off putting look. But there are some key differences between how the companies are trying to push their burgeoning tech forward. Meta’s Orion glasses are actually controlled by three devices—the glasses on your face, a gesture sensing wristband, and a large puck—about the size of a portable charger—that does the bulk of the processing for all the software features. Unlike Meta’s glasses, Snap’s Spectacles are all packed into a single device. That means they are bigger and heavier than the Meta glasses, but also that users won’t have to carry around extra pieces of equipment when they finally make their way into the real world.

“We think it’s interesting that one of the biggest players in virtual reality agrees with us that the future is wearable, see-through, immersive AR,” Myers says. “Spectacles are quite different from the Orion prototype. They’re unique in that they are real immersive AR glasses that are available now, and Lens Studio developers are already building amazing experiences. Spectacles are completely standalone, with no extra puck or other devices required, and are built on a foundation of proven, commercialized technology that can be produced at scale.”

Snap’s goal is to make its Spectacles intuitive, easy to use, and easy to wear. It’s going to take a while to get them there, but they’re well on that path to those three points. All they have to do is shave off some weight. Maybe add some color. And keep people from wandering into traffic.

Updated: 11/25/24 at 10:00 am PT: Corrected a misspelling of Myer's name in a quote tag. Corrected Snap's stance on the “on background” nature of the meeting, which did allow photos and video but not quotes. Also corrected the portrayal of the people in the room during the demo. There were only two Snap employees and one third-party developer, not three Snap employees as previously stated.