the big thing
Every tech giant seems to be betting on augmented reality as an essential element of the future of computing. The companies have been broadcasting this shift while racing to build hardware as quickly as possible, allowing consumers to see Big Tech’s vision of the future in slow motion.
While Facebook/Meta has been building this future in public with Oculus, Apple has been doing so in the background with leaked details illuminating their shifting timelines and plans. While the trillionaire enterprises have been bulking up talent and readying a showdown, Snap — a much smaller company — has been making its own case for AR supremacy building up an audience of users who are warming up to the idea of Snapchat dropping its own digital layer onto the reality we see with our eyes.
This week, I got the opportunity to play around with Snap’s unreleased vision of the future — the company’s augmented reality Spectacles. The device I tried is built exclusively for developers creating on the Snapchat platform and while there are plenty of these headsets out in the wild already, Snap hasn’t indicated any plans to release an AR device for consumers anytime soon.
The glasses are much smaller than a HoloLens of Magic Leap headset, but the capabilities are reined in as well. The avant-garde sunglasses design hides a pair of transparent waveguide displays which pipe in a digital overlay of the world which you can see through the lenses. The company had its Lens Fest event for AR filter creators this week and my demo was in that context so I got to test out a few AR Spectacles-specific lenses which ranged from seeing one developer’s impression of an augmented reality restaurant menu to running away from cartoon zombies.
The device was largely standard fare, I’ve tried out dozens of augmented reality devices over the years and there wasn’t anything too out of the ordinary on display with the Spectacles, which are able to achieve their diminutive size in this developer iteration partially by only having a half-hour battery life which is obviously quite short. It’s clear the device is in its earliest stages with the team focusing largely on nailing the experience of making it easy for mobile developers to ship Snapchat experiences in AR. Snap’s vision seems to be providing bite-sized experiences similar to what has worked for the company on mobile, but ultimately Snap seems to be forecasting a developer-led platform. We haven’t seen much in the way of first-party AR experiences from any of the tech giants yet with most focused on releasing AR development tools.
Snap is very notably the first big company to experiment publicly with a lightweight AR glasses prototype, but both Meta and Apple have clear advantages in this world still.
Apple is already a hardware kingpin with a device and software ecosystem that could keep consumers inside the “walled garden” of services. Meanwhile, Meta has been experimenting in public for more than 6 years with iteration after iteration of VR hardware which run on software with wide design applicability to augmented reality. For now, Snap’s biggest opportunity is its youthful, engaged user base and network of creators already on board. This week, Snap showcased its plan to make the most of the latter.
Critically, this technology is likely still years away from mainstream usage and as we’ve seen time and time again, an awful lot can change in a few years.
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