The latest Snap Spectacles 5 have arrived, introducing a new era of augmented reality hardware design for the social media giant. Introduced at the same time as a brand-new Snap OS, these AR specs go beyond anything Snap has previously accomplished in the smart glasses space.
While Snap has technically been experimenting with smart glasses since it first introduced its “Spectacles” back in 2016, most of these devices didn’t feature true AR capabilities. They were basically just an extension of the Snapchat platform.
Similar to Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses, they allowed users to record videos, snap photos, and upload content to social media—but that was it. The fifth-generation Spectacles are an entirely different creature, going beyond the relatively basic AR capabilities of the Spectacles 4.
I put these glasses to the test to give you a behind-the-scenes look at their pros and cons.
Snap Spectacles 5: Quick Verdict, Pros and Cons
Overall, the Snap Spectacles are relatively powerful, immersive spectacles beyond anything the tech company has produced. They offer access to a rich immersive experience, fantastic visuals, and a phenomenal kit of developer tools. However, the expense of these glasses, their limited availability, and a few missing features may make them less competitive in the AR market.
Pros:
- Crisp, high-quality visuals, with an excellent FOV
- Immersive experiences powered by gesture control
- Integrated artificial intelligence
- Powerful developer toolkit
- Relatively lightweight and comfortable design
- Excellent processing power
Cons:
- Expensive pricing
- Only available to developers
- Limited battery life
- Missing eye tracking features
Snap Spectacles 5 Overview and Specs
The latest generation of Snap’s “Spectacles” smart glasses are standalone, augmented reality glasses unlike anything Snap has produced. Unlike previous Spectacles, which allowed users to capture and share content, the 5th-generation specs can alter your world with digital content.
Powered by the reimagined Snap OS, a new operating system with enhanced augmented reality and spatial computing capabilities, these specs may mark Snap’s official entry into the AR glasses space.
The glasses work seamlessly with your mobile device (according to Snap), and allow you to interact with content using gestures or your voice, through an AI assistant. Plus, they’re designed for immersive collaboration. You can even share what you see with users in spectator mode.
Here’s a quick look at the specs:
- Two liquid crystal on silicon miniature projectors
- 46-degree field of view with 37 pixels per degree resolution
- Dynamic display brightness
- Integrated automatically tinted lenses
- 6DoF AR rendering
- Six microphone array
- Stereo speakers for spatial audio
- Voice and hand tracking
- Two snapdragon processors
- Up to 45-minute battery life
- Four integrated cameras
- Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth connectivity
- 226g weight
- Snap Operating System
Availability and Pricing
One of the most disappointing things about the Snap Spectacles 5 is that they’re not actually available for consumers to buy. You can’t just grab a pair from Snap’s website. The only way to access the glasses is through Snap’s developer program.
You’ll have to sign up for Lens Studio (Snap’s AR software tool), then apply to rent a pair of glasses for $99 per month. You also need to commit to a full year’s subscription. That means you’ll pay over $1,188 to use the glasses, and you won’t necessarily get to keep them.
The reason for this unusual approach is that Snap is going “all-in” on building its developer ecosystem. The company says it wants to become the ultimate AR development partner, inspiring a new way of augmented innovations. Whether this strategy will pan out (particularly with such a high price tag), remains to be seen.
It’s hard to imagine developers wanting to pay so much for a pair of Snap AR glasses when there are plenty of other options out there. However, the ability to take advantage of Snap’s new developer tools and operating system could make the purchase more appealing.
Snap Spectacles 5: The Bulky Design
One of the first things I noticed about the Snap Spectacles 5th edition, is how large they really are. They look, more or less, like a regular pair of spectacles, spliced with the kind of bulky “3D specs” you might get at the cinema. However, while other AR vendors, like RayNeo, are concentrating on making their specs sleeker, Snap seems to be going in the other direction.
The fifth-gen Spectacles are nearly three times larger than the fourth-gen predecessors, and they’re heavier too, at 226 grams. Notably, I didn’t think this extra weight made the glasses too uncomfortable to wear. They’re definitely a lot lighter than products like the Apple Vision Pro.
However, they don’t look particularly stylish – I wouldn’t feel great wearing them in public. If you want to see just how unusual they look for yourself, you can virtually try a pair on with Snap’s “Spectacles” lens here.
Still, Snap did have to bulk these glasses up to make room for all the extra tech they introduced. The new glasses come with four cameras, powering the Snap Spatial engine, as well as waveguide tech, to enable AR capabilities. Plus, there are included speakers, microphones, and cameras to consider too.
One thing I did like from a design and comfort perspective, is the included “dynamic dimming” feature, which automatically tints your glasses for you in brightly-lit spaces.
The Display Quality, Visuals and Audio
Compared to previous Snap Spectacles, the fifth edition glasses definitely have a better display. Snap says it designed the “Optical Engine”, which powers the glasses, from the ground up, to deliver a highly immersive AR display. The powerful LCoS (Liquid Crystal on Silicon) micro-projectors excel at creating rich, vivid images.
The glasses also deliver a relatively tall, and deep field of view. With the Optical Engine, you get a 46-degree diagonal field of view, with a 37 pixel-per-degree resolution. This basically means you get something close to a 100 inch display positioned about ten feet from your eyes.
Another great thing about these specs is that they don’t obscure any of your actual surroundings. The projectors simply place the digital content you’re seeing in the world around you, using spatial mapping to ensure everything feels natural and realistic.
From an audio perspective, Snap promises spatial audio via stereo speakers, but like most of the speakers in AR devices, they lack some depth. I’d probably recommend using a pair of wireless headphones anyway, mainly if you’re collaborating in AR.
Still, the six built-in microphones are relatively effective when you want to collaborate in AR. Plus, the ability to share your view with other users is a nice touch, particularly for enterprise users.
Snap Spectacles 5: Augmented Reality and Performance
Like many of the top contenders in the smart glasses space, Snap’s spectacles are powered by Snapdragon processors. The major difference between these glasses and some of their competitors is the dual system-on-a-chip architecture.
The infrastructure splits the computing workload across two processors, helping to minimize lag and reduce power consumption. Plus, the design includes a set of titanium vapor changes to improve heat dissipation. That’s a valuable upgrade, considering previous Snap Spectacles had a habit of overheating pretty quickly.
Snap’s new “Snap OS” definitely delivers some great performance improvements, too. It gives you a comprehensive system you can navigate, literally, from the palm of your hand. For instance, you can pull the main menu into the palm of your hand and then tap on the apps you want to use.
Plus, thanks to the spatial computing abilities built into the glasses, you can also use a range of gestures (like tapping and pinching) to interact with your lenses. For those who prefer to use voice for content interaction, there’s a generative AI assistant too.
According to Snap, the Spatial Engine built into the glasses understands the world around you using AI so that your virtual content appears realistically in 3D. I definitely felt that the AR experience was a lot more immersive with these glasses than it was with the Spectacles 4.
The big downside, potentially, is that although the Specs can track hand movements and voice, they don’t include eye tracking. That means you won’t get the same “glance to select” features you’d get from something like the Apple Vision Pro.
Plus, it’s worth noting that these glasses will only deliver up to 45 minutes of performance on a full charge. That’s not ideal if you’re going to be using AR specs all day.
Snap Spectacles 5: Apps and Developer Tools
The Snap Spectacles connect directly with your phone, allowing you to interact with all the apps and tools you’d typically use there (such as Snapchat). However, it’s worth noting that not all smartphone operating systems are designed to work perfectly with AR glasses at this point.
Not all of the apps you can interact with on your phone will offer an immersive experience. However, Snap has announced partnerships with various third-party companies to create unique experiences. For instance, you can build with AR blocks in a dedicated Lego app.
Plus, Snap recently partnered with OpenAI, and says it’s planning on bringing cloud-hosted multimodal AI solutions to its AR headset. Already the AI integration allows users to create 3D animations based on prompts. New updates and feature sets could create a range of new experiences for users going forward.
Ultimately, though, Snap relies on developers to create their own experiences with Spectacles 5 rather than relying on pre-built solutions. Snap’s newly rebuilt Lens Studio 5.0 aims to boost the developer experience.
It comes with an advanced “Spectacles Interaction Kit”, that allows users to build AR experiences (what Snap calls Lenses), without building interaction systems from scratch. The Lens Studio 5.0 system also supports TypeScript, JavaScript, and new version control features. Plus, Snap’s machine learning solution (SnapML) allows developers to use custom ML models in Lenses too.
Snap will even provide developers with access to cloud-hosted multimodal AI models through its partnership with OpenAI, introducing even more opportunities to creators.
Snap Spectacles 5 Review: The Verdict
Ultimately, I see the Snap Spectacles 5 as an interesting step forward for the tech company. These glasses come with a lot of great features, from integrated spatial computing, to fantastic visuals. They’re also clearly designed to address the needs of developers in the AR space.
However, I think Snap might need to find ways to reduce the cost of “renting” its hardware if it really wants to become the ultimate AR development partner. It may also need to consider making a few upgrades, particularly related to eye-tracking features and battery life.
As other XR leaders, such as Meta and Apple, start to plan their own AR glasses, Snap will have a lot of work to do if it wants to reach the top of the augmented reality podium.
