It’s hard to believe it’s been six months since Snap unveiled Spectacles, Gen 5 at its September Partner Summit. We were there for the unveiling (see our launch coverage and hands-on review) and to moderate a panel discussion at the event. So the milestone caught our attention.

Spectacles launch in retrospect was a key moment to mark 2024’s return to seethrough optical AR. Along with Meta Orion, which came just one week later, it signaled investment in the format (more on that in a bit), after high-profile departures and retractions such as Microsoft Hololens.

In any case, Snap is commemorating today’s six-month Spectacles anniversary with a series of updates. These include a new developer rewards program, lenses, and features (details below) in Snap OS – the platform that was built for and launched alongside Spectacles Gen 5.

Finally, Snap has released an interview featuring Evan Spiegel and Spectacles Developer Aidan Wolf. The two dive into development dynamics for headworn AR, as well as ruminations on the broader AR industry and where Snap sits in that ecosystem (embedded further below).

Snap Uplevels AR: Hands on With Spectacles Gen 5

Highlight Reel

Going deeper into all the above, here’s the highlight reel of Snap updates around today’s Spectacles anniversary.

Platform updates

  • Location Enabled: Lenses can now be location aware by tapping into GPS, GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System), compass heading, and custom locations.
  • Leaderboards: Creators can integrate leaderboards into their lenses to gamify them and infuse some friendly competition.
  • AR Keyboard: Add text input using the new system AR keyboard, which features a full and numeric layout for streamlined typing.
  • Hand Tracking: Three new hand tracking capabilities including phone detector to identify when a user has a phone in their hands, grab gesture, and refinements to targeting intent to reduce false positives while typing.
  • Improved Lens Unlock: Open links to Lenses directly from messaging threads, like Snapchat, iMessage or Google Messages.

New and/or Updated Lenses

  • NavigatAR from Utopia Labs is a sample Lens that shows how GPS, Snap Map Tiles, and compass heading can be used to help you get from point A to point B. Similarly, Path Pioneer is another sample Lens that provides building blocks for creating indoor and outdoor AR walking courses to keep users active.
  • Peridot Beyond is getting a multiplayer update that lets users see and interact with their Dots and friends’ Dots in the same session. This update also connects Spectacles and the Peridot mobile game, allowing progression within the AR glasses experience to reward users on mobile.
  • Doggo Quest from Wabisabi gamifies the dog walking experience, using SnapML to recognize users’ pets and apply personalized visual effects. It tracks metrics including routes and step counts, and rewards users with items like virtual bones along the way.
  • Basketball Trainer is adding a holographic AR coach and shooting drills that automatically track users’ score using SnapML.

Developer Rewards

Soon after introducing Challenge Tags, Snap is adding Spectacles Community Challenges – a new way that AR developers can be rewarded: Specifically, they can win cash prizes for submitting new or updating existing Lenses, judged on engagement, technical excellence, and Lens quality.

To do this, Snap has teamed up with the AR marketing platform Lenslist so that eligible Spectacles developers can participate. Every month, more than $20,000 will be distributed to 10 developers, which maps to the top 5 new Lenses, top 5 updated Lenses, and top open source Lens.

Reflections & Ruminations

Lastly, as noted, Snap produced a video interview between Evan Spiegel and Aidan Wolf. Here’s the full clip…

Confidence Signals

Back to Spectacles’ symbolic industry moment, there are several headworn AR form factors. Without going too deep into technicalities, the main demarcation is optical seethrough (Spectacles, Orion) and video passthrough (Meta Quest, Apple Vision Pro). They each have pros and cons.

The short version is that passthrough video offers better UX quality such as color, contrast, and field of view. However, the hardware is bulky. Optical seethrough is the inverse – better wearability, portability, and social acceptability but inferior optical UX in the aggregate (at least for now).

Based on these dynamics, many pundits deem optical seethrough the long-run winner, due to social acceptability, while video passthrough is optimal today. We disagree with this linear construct and believe these formats will coexist for years, applied to areas they respectively shine.

But based on that short/long-term construct, many have prioritized investment in video passthrough in the near term, such as Apple and Meta. That brings us back to Spectacles launch as it, again, marked Snap’s investment and confidence signals in the optical seethrough format.

Of course, Meta is investing in both – along with non-display AI glasses – but Snap’s primary optical see-through investment is meaningful. As we wrote in our Spectacles review, this decision was grounded in Snap’s social DNA – and that will continue to drive all its AR endeavors.

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