playing like it seems like something out of science fiction

THE augmented reality wants to change the way humanity relates to the environment. This is a technology that some companies have been working on for many years, like Meta (formerly Facebook) with its famous Quest which has become almost a standard in the industry, and now they are going even further with the ambitious Meta Orion. Snapchat also took its first steps 8 years ago with very discreet success both in Europe and in the rest of the world and now intends to sit down with its new Spectacles glasses.

Just a few days ago, Snapchat launched its program in Europe allowing developers to start working on the platform by creating applications and finding possible uses. However, in EL ESPAÑOL – El Androide Libre we were able to try them with advance notice at the Qualcomm Summit in 2024, the same event where the new processors that will be the stars of the smart phones high-end products in the coming months.

Snapchat Spectacles are available by subscription 110 dollars per month for 12 months for anyone who wants to get started with testingalthough it is not yet known when they will be sold, how much they will cost or how they will reach the market. These types of devices are now experiencing a second golden age thanks, in part, to the launch of Apple’s Vision Pro which managed to revolutionize the market, although with a different approach focused on mixed reality.

Bulky, but comfortable

Accustomed to wearing glasses for at least a decade, Spectacles feel too big and can even become cumbersome at first. After this first shockperhaps typical of a device intended for exclusive use by developers and not as a final product, it is necessary to configure the device thanks to the fact that it is linked to a smart phone with which to customize some essential parameters.

As explained during the demonstration, the application on the mobile phone allows you to establish certain parameters which They depend on the disposition of each person’s eyes. In this way, the projection of virtual content manages to personalize the experience to a certain extent and avoid dizziness or headaches.

Regarding the latter, during the minutes that I was able to test the glasses, neither of these two conditions occurred. They also don’t seem particularly heavy (226 grams) despite their exterior appearance and the large size of their lenses. However, within a few minutes of wearing them and starting to use them, the body-mind pair ends up getting used to it.

The glasses have slightly darkened lenses where content is displayed. According to Snap, it’s a “transparent stereo display” equipped with “miniature silicon liquid crystal projectors.”

This technology offers a 46 degree field of view and a resolution of 37 pixels each two. They also explain that it has a “motion to photon” latency of 13 milliseconds and a refresh rate of 120 Hz. In the next section we analyze the user experience.

Audio is handled by a stereo speaker system combined with a set of 6 microphones for sound input. The Shows include a system of background noise suppression and echo cancellation. All this is powered by a battery that, as the company explains, lasts up to 45 minutes and managed by Qualcomm Snapdragon processors with distributed computing.

Management and experience

Where the greatest technological innovation is found is in the gesture recognition system. The glasses incorporate a series of sensors on the front specifically dedicated to tracking the movement of fingers and hands, as well as the interaction of content with the environment.

These sensors consist of two high-resolution color cameras, two others which capture the infrared spectrum and a third sensor that captures movement on 6 axes. The combination of data collected by each of them is processed so that the user can move around the interface and so that it adapts to the location of the room.

Unlike other solutions such as Apple’s Vision Pro, the Spectacles do not require any type of cable to operate. The batteries integrated into the frame of the glasses are sufficient to operate, although it is true that their resolution or their computing power are still very far from the proposal of Tim Cook’s company.

Although still in development, Spectacles offers a good performance in terms of fluency and gesture recognition. The first step to take, after placing them in your head, is to start with a short but useful demonstration of how to interact with the content.

The sensors then capture the movement of arms, hands and fingers with which the user navigates through the interface in a very intuitive and fast way. Gestures like using the pliers with the thumb and index finger of the right hand to grasp a virtual object or extending the left arm to open the options menu are internalized in a very direct way for the user. It’s surprising how gentle the learning slope is.

Apps and games

Being a pre-release version, the apps installed in Spectacles were very limited and with the desire to serve as an example to developerssomething like a demo of what the platform is capable of. However, one of the most representative games was the one with building tiles.

Upon opening the application, the first step was to find a flat surface and large enough to start construction. In my case, I used a pool table as a backboard, which the sensors were able to recognize as a good surface within seconds.

In a second, a pile of LEGO chips appears projected onto the pool table. And that’s when the whole thing is really starting to make sense. Simply bring your hand closer and make the gesture of grabbing a coin so that it follows, as if by magic, the movement of your hand.

The user you can turn it however you want and, using the 3D model, the map is rotated as desired so that it can be viewed from any possible angle. To continue the construction game, simply stack each of the pieces one by one and create the desired figure.

The construction remains fixed on the table, so the the user can also move around the entire room to be able to see it from any point of view. This is just one of the possibilities that open up with this type of augmented reality technology.

Likewise, from Snapchat they also indicate the addition of generative multimodal artificial intelligence on board glasses. This can be used to search any query on the Internet, generate 3-dimensional parts and display personalized content.

In the section of things that I think should improve, I can highlight two, although closely related. The first of these would be to improve the field of vision. THE 46 degrees that the glasses did not reach for depending on the scenarios.

All you have to do is turn your head a little too much to no longer see, for example, the construction that you had completed. With a lens that projects more degrees, get a more panoramic view and, ultimately, enveloping for greater immersion in the tasks to be carried out.

The second concerns resolution. In the middle of 2024, almost already in 2025, the user I can’t wait to discover the content with more clarity. More than games like construction, I’m thinking of slightly more advanced applications that require more refined details.