Snap's AR Spectacles are coming to developers in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Austria, and The Netherlands.
Last month the upgraded Spectacles launched to interested developers in the US, priced at $99/month. In Europe, the price will be €110/month.
This price is a rental, not a purchase, and the minimum term is 12 months. If you stop subscribing, you have to send the glasses back to Snap.
David Heaney
Snap Spectacles (2024) are fully standalone and wireless AR glasses, though their bulk pushes the limits of what can be described as a true glasses form factor.
They have a field of view of 46 degrees, similar to Xreal glasses and slightly below Hololens 2, and a 36 pixels per degree (PPD) resolution, similar to Apple Vision Pro.
While the onboard battery life of Snap Spectacles is just 45 minutes, the device has a USB-C port on one stem that you can use to power it for indefinite usage.
Spectacles run Snap OS, which the company claims is a "purpose-built, brand new operating system" for AR.
The glasses feature hand tracking, and the main menu of Snap OS is anchored to one of your hands to be interacted with using the other. It also has on-device speech recognition for text input.
Developers build "Lenses" for Snap OS, the company's terms for apps, using Lens Studio 5.0. Snap says developers can easily build Lenses using Spectacles Interaction Kit, and more advanced Lenses can be written using TypeScript and JavaScript. To identify, track, and augment real world objects, SnapML lets developers use custom machine learning models in their Lenses.
Additionally, developers can leverage your smartphone as a 6DoF tracked controller. And with Spectator Mode nearby smartphone users can see what you're seeing in AR.
Spectacles is still an early development kit, and now AR developers in the EU can start working with them too.
