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Welcome to Lowpass! This week: Snap’s new AR Spectacles, and Holoride’s charting a new course.

Everything you need to know about Snap’s new Spectacles 

Snapchat maker Snap used its annual partner summit to unveil a new version of its Spectacles glasses this week. It’s the fifth version of Spectacles overall, and the second to feature AR functionality. The new 2024 Spectacles are a major overhaul of the AR glasses the company unveiled in 2021, which were somewhere between a proof of concept and early developer hardware.

“The last version, I was like: Okay, I get it, but this is definitely not it,” admitted Snap’s AR platform director Sophia Dominguez during an interview with me last week. “[With the new version], you really start to see what the future is when it comes to experiencing AR in the real world.”

Snap’s new Spectacles are a notable improvement, with better optics, a wider field-of-view, support for hand tracking and social AR experiences, as well as a new spatial UI. They’re also still not exactly ready for the masses. Instead, they’re pretty bulky, have significant technical limitations, and aren’t priced for or marketed to consumers.

I had a chance to try the new Spectacles ahead of Tuesday’s announcement, and chat with Dominguez about the company’s AR hardware strategy. I also poked around a bit to see what’s at work under the hood, and how much Snap lives up to its commitment to turn Spectacles into what its CEO Evan Spiegel described as “the most developer-friendly platform in the whole world” this week.

Here’s what I learned:

First, some specs: The new Spectacles feature stereoscopic see-through AR powered by waveguide optics and liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS) projectors. They offer a 46° diagonal field of view with a 37 pixels per degree resolution, and are powered by dual Spandragon XR processors. 

There’s no external puck or phone tethering, and the integrated batteries support up to 45 minutes of continuous use. Developers can also connect the glasses to USB power for longer work sessions. The glasses include infrared cameras for hand tracking, high-res color cameras for capture and computer vision, and a bunch of other stuff you might expect (microphones, stereo speakers etc.) Altogether, this brings their weight to 226 grams.

Okay, but what do all those numbers mean in practice? 

These are some massive glasses. The first thing I noticed about the new Spectacles is that they’re chunky. They look a bit like oversized glasses The Umbrella Academy’s buffed-up Luther Hargreeves might wear on the moon, or maybe like something the designers of Tesla’s cyber truck might come up with if their brief simply said BIG GLASSES.

All joking aside, the size and weight of these things is notable. Wearing them isn’t uncomfortable exactly, but you definitely feel like a weight is lifted from your face when taking them off again. Dominguez pointed out to me that they’re less than half the weight of a typical VR headset. Then again, they’re also around four times as heavy as Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses. Those admittedly don’t offer any AR, but they’re much closer to the ultimate goal every company in this space is chasing: A device that feels indistinguishable from regular eyewear.

“We're still very much in the intentional wear phase of AR glasses,” Dominguez acknowledged. “While this device is so bulkier than a really lightweight form of glasses, that's where we're going.”

It’s worth noting that Snap could have brought down weight and size if it had opted for a more limited, assistive approach to AR, something Brilliant Labs has done with its Frames. However, these kinds of monocular AR glasses (only one lens displays AR) are much more limited in utility. Most importantly, they don’t offer 3D immersion, as Dominguez pointed out during our conversation. “We want interacting with AR technology to feel the same way as interacting with the real world,” she said.

The optics are impressive, and limited. I got to try a bunch of different experiences on the new Spectacles, including a game of chess, golf, drawing, playing with AR Legos and a special version of Niantic’s Peridot. The graphics in those experiences were impressively bright, clear and detailed, and easily visible both inside and out in the sun.

• Spectacles offer automatic dimming. Walking from the inside to an outside balcony, they automatically adjusted to the much brighter ambient light, increasing the visibility of AR objects. Alternatively, wearers can manually adjust dimming – but it’s not quite as aggressive as on devices like the Magic Leap 2, which lets you basically tune out the outside world for a more VR-like experience.

• The new Spectacles automatically scan your surroundings for some basic surface detection, and AR objects are generally locked to tabletops, the floor and other surfaces. There was a bit of jittering when I moved my head, and the Spectacles I used at one point estimated the floor to be about a foot above its actual location. Still, overall, the optics were pretty impressive.

• The biggest notable downside was the field-of-view. It’s much bigger than that of the 2021 Spectacles, but still frustratingly limited, and optimized for vertical, mobile-like experiences. I frequently had to turn my head to keep objects in view, and even regularly had basic menus cut off at the edges. This can get tiring quickly.

• You could actually notice the severity of this limitation during Evan Spiegel’s on-stage demo of the device this week: As soon as he moved his head just by a few degrees, AR elements in front of him were cut off. Even a Snapchat ghost he drew was too big for the device’s field-of-view.

Snap OS is bubbly, and mysterious. The new Spectacles are powered by something the company calls Snap OS, which comes with simple menus optimized to be used with your hands.

• The UI felt playful and bubbly, and its 3D buttons reminded me somewhat of the look and feel of early iOS versions.

• What’s going on under the hood is a bit less clear. I asked Snap reps multiple times whether Snap OS was based on Android, and they declined to comment.

• Snap’s open source disclosures are equally opaque. They do list a lot of Android system modules, but also a bunch of Linux stuff, and even a few AliOS pieces thrown in for good measure.

• I asked a subject matter expert about this, who told me that it looked like the list included any and all open source software that was used to develop the device and its backend services, no matter whether they run on the actual hardware or not.

• Ultimately, it does appear that the company used Android to build Snap OS, with an employee’s LinkedIn profile suggesting that the glasses are utilizing “Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 running AOSP.”

• Using Android could come with some downsides, especially if Snap intends to license the OS down the road. Dominguez left the door open for that possibility. “Ultimately, Snap OS could be a really attractive OS for powering future third-party AR experiences,” she said. “But we're early in this journey.”

It’s a developer device, with significant limitations. Snap’s new Spectacles are shipping now, but they’re not actually for sale for the time being. Instead, developers have to sign up for a $99 per month subscription with a one-year minimum commitment, which means they have to shell out at least $1200. Once that first year is up, they can keep paying $99 a month, or opt to return the device.

• This may sound odd, but I think it’s actually a smart approach. By making this a hardware subscription for developers, Snap is able to sidestep any expectation-setting for the pricing of any future consumer versions in a way that Apple opted not to do with the Vision Pro.

• Spiegel also made a big deal of announcing that the company is launching Spectacles “with no developer tax,” meaning that it won’t take any cut from paid AR experiences. A company spokesperson later clarified that this was a long-term commitment.

• That’s enticing in theory, but in practice won’t matter much for years to come: Snap is reportedly only building 10,000 of these, so any rev share income would be miniscule for the company anyway.

• The company does position it as a major gatekeeper for Spectacles developers: The only way to build AR experiences for Spectacles is to use Snap’s Lens Studio software. WebXR is not being supported on the device, I was told by company representatives.

• The flip side of that is that Snap is tapping into a major developer community, as Dominguez pointed out with a not so subtle swipe at Meta. “While other companies are shutting down their mobile tools, we see this as a way to leverage our 375,000 AR developers and creators and translate this into the next computing platform,” she told me.

All in all, Snap’s new Spectacles feel like a big step on the path towards consumer AR, but also show that it will still take years before these kinds of devices are ready for the masses. Whether Snap, a company with around 1.2% of Meta’s market cap, has the stomach to see this journey through is another question altogether.

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Holoride rides again

Holoride, the German startup that has been working on bringing VR to the car, is re-emerging from bankruptcy: After filing for insolvency in May, Holoride announced a major restructuring this week that comes with a significant shift in focus going forward.

As part of the restructuring, Holoride is launching a new corporate entity called the Holoride Technologies Group in Singapore, whose founders include Holoride’s CEO Nils Wollny as well as Jing Jing Xu and Tony Chen, two longtime Holoride investors. Development work will continue in Munich through a subsidiary.

Holoride got originally spun out of Audi in 2018. Its first product, introduced in late 2022, was a €699 kit consisting of a HTC Vive Flow VR headset and a game controller that made it possible to synchronize VR entertainment with the motion of select Audi models.

Now, Holoride is giving up on selling hardware directly to consumers. Instead, it is focusing squarely on B2B, and moving beyond VR: Beginning next year, Holoride plans to support a wider variety of VR headsets, as well as smartphones, tablets and AR glasses, and help the automotive industry to synchronize motion and location of a car with entertainment on those devices.

That’s still very much in line with Holoride’s original vision: When I first met Wollny in 2022, he told me that Holoride was at its core more than a VR startup. “We built a motion- and location-aware platform for content in moving vehicles,” he said at the time, suggesting that this could even involve using the car’s cabin lights or massage seats for feedback. “It could bring a new level of immersion to the interiors of cars.”

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What else

Former Moviepass CEO Mich Lowe pleads guilty. Lowe, who previously had leading roles at Netflix and Redbox, could serve up to five years in prison.

Apple Music makes audio haptics widely available. The accessibility feature, which accompanies music playback with vibrations, is rolling out as part of iOS 18.

Doing the same boring work again and again is exhausting. What if you had a personal AI assistant who could do the job for you? (SPONSORED)

YouTube launches all the things. It’s been a busy couple of days Google-owned video site: YouTube launched Communities, generative video for Shorts, a new promotional tool called Hype and additional generative AI tools for creators this week. Next up: A revamp of YouTube’s smart TV app.

Malware infects 1.3 million Android streaming boxes. Many of the impacted devices were being sold in developing countries.

Meta, EssilorLuxottica strike 10-year glasses deal. The two companies extended their partnership for years to come.

Sonos Arc Ultra and Sub 4 leak. The embattled smart speaker maker appears close to announcing two new products.

HTC announces Vive Focus Vision headset. The $1000 VR headset features color pass-through and generally improves on the 2021 Vive Focus 3.

YouTube is rolling out pause ads. Good luck catching a break from ads in 2024 …

That’s it / a correction

Do you ever have the feeling that time stopped progressing in a linear fashion since the pandemic? I know I do, and I frequently mix up the last couple of years. Or at least I’d like to think that’s why I made a mistake in last week’s edition of Lowpass, writing that The Trade Desk’s TV OS project began in 2019. In reality, it started in 2021. My bad! In other news, I’m so glad it’s Friday today.

Thanks for reading, have a great weekend!