13 ms·
New Snap Spectacles Feature Augmented Reality Display
- kevando 5y agoFinally :D
- hanniabu 5y agoHad no idea this was still a thing, I thought they abandoned it after the first release.
- unixhero 5y agoI for one miss the wonky yellow first design iteration.
- my_usernam3 5y agoI second this. These look like you just left a 3d ride at an amusement park and forgot to take off the glasses.
- lesinski 5y agoTheir first design was trend-setting in eyewear. This one looks like it's behind the curve.
- stronglikedan 5y agoWhat? You don't like the McFlurry-spoons-taped-to-head look?
- BugsJustFindMe 5y agoThey're quite hideous.
- upwardbound 5y agoarticle at the verge https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/20/22445481/snap-spectacles-ar-augmented-reality-announced https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/20/22445481/snap-spectacles-...
- bredren 5y agoThe demo on their page, is this meant to look like a tamagotchi-style entertainment distraction? Or are they expecting people to use these for real interactions? I can’t understand why a pond and butterfly make sense overlaid on a forest.
- jayd16 5y agoHere's a video with a better example of it. Doesn't look like a pond. Its more like alien flowers or something. https://twitter.com/i/status/1395439601590833156 https://twitter.com/i/status/1395439601590833156
- cinntaile 5y agoThis reminded me of a 90s commercial, I think it's the colouring?
- ChrisArchitect 5y agojust realized the last part they snuck in there -- These aren't for sale, only for 'creators' looking to use them to develop 'Lenses' and AR stuff etc. hmph.
- upwardbound 5y agoFwiw at least this way if your idea gets approved you don't have to pay for the glasses -- much more fair to people entering SW development from impoverished backgrounds. To apply there's a form at the bottom of the page.
- viccuad 5y agoyou give them your idea and control over it, basically. What could go wrong.
- upwardbound 5y agoYour idea is your personal intellectual property. You can even patent it if you want. The only reason for having a form at all is to give the limited number of units to the people who will really put their heart into making something incredible.
- moralestapia 5y ago>You can even patent it if you want. No. You cannot patent something that has been publicly disclosed.
- upwardbound 5y agoWhich country are you referring to? In the US you have 1 year. https://www.patenttrademarkblog.com/inventor-grace-period-late-apply-patent/#:~:text=Yes%2C%20a%201%2Dyear%20grace,file%20a%20US%20patent%20application https://www.patenttrademarkblog.com/inventor-grace-period-la....
- mrfusion 5y agoDo these take photos and videos? What does it show in the glasses?
- upwardbound 5y agoit's one of those animated scrolling webpages. Scroll down and you can see a simulated view thru the waveguides
- mrfusion 5y agoThanks I did see that but I still don’t get it. It’s like a flower and a butterfly? How does that help me achieve my life goals?
- upwardbound 5y agoOh gotcha. Right now it's a developer platform. It runs any JS code + graphics that you write in Lens Studio. https://lensstudio.snapchat.com/ https://lensstudio.snapchat.com/ In terms of what I personally look forward to the most, I can't wait to see what the next generation of kids do with it, like the Wozniak era that grew up simultaneously with the first personal computers.
- mrfusion 5y agoThanks. That makes sense. My life goals will have to wait.
- kthejoker2 5y agoI instantly want to create some kind of adtech dystopia.
- upwardbound 5y agoFrom the website: 26.3 degree diagonal field of view (stereo). Display brightness up to 2,000 nits. I worked on these but am not allowed to say anything other than citing public sources.
- Judgmentality 5y agoCan you say anything about potential applications? What do you think will be the killer app for this?
- jeffbee 5y agoWhat would be any app for this? It's not immediately apparent why anyone would want this.
- stevewodil 5y agoTurn by turn navigation that shows you the path to follow in AR that's overlaid on the real road. No more missing your exit, no more not being exactly sure which turn it wants you to take, etc. Would that appease you?
- gotostatement 5y agosounds dangerous to wear AR glasses while driving
- gotostatement 5y agolol only on hacker news would this statement be controversial
- ffggvv 5y agowould be coool while walking. alot of cars already have HUDs like that overlayed onto the windshield
- vineyardmike 5y ago
- pugworthy 5y agoI can tell you what I definitely would not be wearing or interacting with on the beach or in the forest: these for digital distractions and games.
- sva_ 5y agoIt could be interesting to use them for info visualization and interaction though. Placing ideas in your surroundings while on a nice walk through the forest pondering about something you're passionate about sounds pretty intriguing to me.
- pugworthy 5y agoAgreed. Also just local things like plant info, geology, history, trails, etc.
- mncharity 5y agoHiking with a naturalist on their home turf can be amazing. As they "read the landscape" and tell you its stories. Plant mixes telling of long-term changes in progress, seen frozen in time. Tales of long- and short-term environmental history. "This area was logged last century; here are fire scars from a decade ago; here this biome is slowly taking over from that biome; this stream dries out some summers, or these <plant> would instead be <other plant>; etc". Similarly for geology. History. Some stories can be stably linked to location. "The geology of this roadside exposure is ...". Others need some dynamic recognition. "That's a finch". Others need a blend. Or tracking and/or modeling environment state. Mapped buildings vs "that's a car" vs "today's chalkboard menu with updates". Then guide story selection by user long-term and attentional interests, understanding, and educational learning objectives. Tree and pebble identification become stories of deep-time geological and evolutionary history and processes. Ambient dinosaurs. Some of what a good guide, or teacher, or tutor might do... if they spent their days perched on your ear. The future could be a blast. Sad we're moving so very sloowwwwwwwwly.
- boringg 5y agoI feel like this is one of those technologies that over the next decade will finally be accepted into the public domain as it gets more compact and real use cases present themselves. It's like the early days of DSLR to some degree.
- m3kw9 5y agoIt says try it on in-app, I tried it on and they look like those UV shades for old ppl that blocks sun from the sides. No one in their right minds would wear them in public.
- achow 5y agoThese are not for sale. These Spectacles, however, aren’t ready for the mass market. Unlike past models, Snap isn’t selling them. Instead, it’s giving them directly to an undisclosed number of AR effects creators through an application program online. (Another indication they aren’t ready for everyday use: the battery only lasts 30 minutes.) https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/20/22445481/snap-spectacles-ar-augmented-reality-announced https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/20/22445481/snap-spectacles-...
- twobitshifter 5y agoAre you saying old people are not in their right minds? I’d argue the opposite with regards to fashion choices, but I don’t think old people would go for these either.
- tartoran 5y agoIncidentally I'm only 40 and am often wearing those type of shades because my eyes are very sensitive and constant squinting gives me migraines. I actually came to like them quite a bit and two of my friends got them too, not out of need but because they think they look cool so its a very subjective thing after all.
- vmception 5y agoOlder people are the larger subset of people that care less about their fashion, mostly because they have no support system that would bother or care either. When the benefit disappears so does their mental resources in keeping up. For a clearer example, look at someone tech savvy and someone of the same age that makes excuses about being technophobic related to their age. They both have solidarity amongst other people that enable their choices.
- codezero 5y ago
- jayd16 5y agoSo is this streaming from your phone? No technical specs on compute are listed as far as I can tell.
- upwardbound 5y agoThe compute is built-in. I'm not sure if we've published performance specs but if you want you could try to contact one of the creators who has them and get them to run some benchmarks. For small devices like this one, one of the biggest challenges is thermal management, so the performance measured for short experiences will likely differ from that which can be sustained over a longer time. (Just due to the nature of heat transfer - less mass means less heat storage capacity, and less surface area means less cooling)
- thebigman433 5y agoMost exciting thing for me is that they might actually be bright enough to use outside. The dim displays of most other headsets is one of the worst things about them. We're still a long way from consumer AR headsets, but I am excited for the future of them, and I think these experimental devices are still great.
- moralestapia 5y agoThe cycle of "missed" opportunities. 1. Competitor A: "The new Spectacles are not for sale. They’re built for creators looking to push the limits of immersive AR experiences." 2. Competitor B: * actually sells the product * * time goes by * 3. Competitor B acquires 80%+ market share while other's "never saw it coming".
- theFak 5y agoWhy is that bad?
- upwardbound 5y agoIf anyone wants to, I'd highly encourage you to fill out the "Become a Creator" form with the idea of using the glasses to operate an "AR space" venue, like those VR spaces where people go with their family to play games. You could charge members of the public 20 bucks for 20 min of playing games that you make and you would be sold out for months because regular people don't have many chances to try AR without shelling out thousands on a hololens.
- yodon 5y agoIf you run the numbers on trying to run an AR arcade, you'll find the cost of cleaning, sorting, handing out, putting away, and teaching clueless people to use the goggles for the first time are far more time, labor, and dollar expensive than you expect. It's surprisingly difficult to run the numbers in ways that make it even a remotely good business to open.
- sixothree 5y agoWhat would be cool is if they could block out extremely bright point lights like oncoming cars or the sun.
- js8 5y agoI wouldn't use these for AR, but just as a display. It would be really nice to be able to just walk or sit or lay in nature, and work there, with a combination of AR glasses and chorded keyboard. Too bad they killed Google Glass.
- FreakyT 5y agoDid you ever use Glass? The display was really too small to get work done; I would describe it as identical in functionality to a smartwatch, just on your face instead of wrist.
- ipsum2 5y agoYou can still buy Google Glass, but the Hololens sounds more in line with what you're envisioning.
- goodcjw2 5y agoHow about just using Apple Watch as a display? The display has similar size. Maybe being able to have the display already there is useful?
- mncharity 5y agoNreal Light provides a fairly clean 1080p virtual ~115 inch screen floating at 2 meters. It's available variously outside the US. Inside the US, there's ebay with SKorea units (plus varying US Customs duties). I'm screen mirroring my laptop (as I type this, but not usually) using a usb3-from-hdmi dongle to work around issues. Assorted polish and comfort issues. Support is poor, so it's not turn-key, more hobby project.
- ipsum2 5y agoProps for not hiding the FoV of the glasses, its just front and center on the page, unlike other AR companies.
- rbanffy 5y agoWhen I saw the hololens videos, I assumed they were doing some clever oclusion with, perhaps, LCD shutters to hide what the AR object would prevent you from seeing. Not only the FoV, it was a total disappointment.
- rbanffy 5y agoThey match the Tesla Cybertruck's style perfectly
- shoto_io 5y agoOk, I am gonna say it out loud: This is nice and all. Great hardware work for sure. But: This is not going to work commercially. Watch the twitter videos and you'll know why [1]. It's all nice and shiny, but it has no utility whatsoever. People will get bored after day 2. And then, 3-5 years from now Apple will come in with their iGlasses and everyone will absolutely love them. Because they will integrate them deeply in their ecosystem and have some real use-cases. These look more like a Proof of Concept. [1] https://twitter.com/Spectacles/status/1395442287367266304?s=20 https://twitter.com/Spectacles/status/1395442287367266304?s=...
- upwardbound 5y agoIf Apple copies anything from us, I hope they copy this: The computer-generated voice we used in the Spectacles V4 out-of-box experience tutorial is a gender-neutral voice. We did this as the start of a journey of attempting to convince the software industry to stop making A.I. assistants be female so often. Having female A.I. assistants perpetuates the gender wage gap by creating the idea that assistant jobs are a women's role. This is a big issue that needs to be tackled and I'm proud to have helped with it in a small way. If anyone reading this works on Siri, Alexa, Cortana, or Google Assistant, please consider asking your management to adopt gender-neutral voice technology. Here is UNESCO imploring companies to do this: https://en.unesco.org/EQUALS/voice-assistants https://en.unesco.org/EQUALS/voice-assistants "[UNESCO] advises companies and governments to, among other actions: end the practice of making digital assistants female by default; explore the feasibility of developing a neutral machine gender for voice assistants that is neither male nor female"
- corndoge 5y agoThis is such a weird response to a technical criticism, do you have anything to say about anything the parent poster said?
- upwardbound 5y agoOh, I totally understand the parent poster's perspective and they might 100% be right. If I were a betting man I would bet on Apple; who wouldn't? Only time will tell; I wasn't trying to refute the parent poster in any way. Was just highlighting an aspect of Specs that I really believe in that isn't in the press and wanted to put this somewhere that someone from Apple might hopefully read it.
- reasonabl_human 5y agoMost HN folks interested in hacking on an AR platform will be happy to know there’s a far more capable open source software and hardware platform: https://docs.projectnorthstar.org/getting-started/faq https://docs.projectnorthstar.org/getting-started/faq 100 deg FOV, as many functions / connectivity features as a HoloLens 2, now that’s awesome. You can bypass the virtue signaling, limited app ecosystem, and high price tag and build whatever you’d like.
- mclightning 5y agoYou have no idea what you are talking about. That one is just using semitransparent mirrors, whereas linked project has waveguide optics. One is a donkey, one is a Lambo in terms of technology. Which ones have you actually tried out of these said products; project northstar, hololens, above example?
- rad_gruchalski 5y agoThis is really cool. I would love to see something like this with an ability to pair with a watch or a phone via bluetooth so one could get realtime location of a user upon a consent. I truly believe such glasses can serve good cause in an elderly care / support space. For example, being able to show directions in realtime for public transport options, directions (bit like a windscreen hud in modern vehicles) would be a game changer for many people. I can think of many, many applications for it. I'm hoping the apple glasses are coming and building such solutions will be possible. I'd pay for something like this without hesitation.
- upwardbound 5y agoYes, these have a location API! (with consent). Like you said, they pair with the phone when available, and also have built-in GPS.
- rad_gruchalski 5y agoI was looking at the Lens api last night but couldn't find any relevant location stuff. I figured there must be something available because it's possible to get localized weather info. Where can I read more about it?
- deycallmeajay 5y agoThis is dope! It’s more of a toy then a must have but that’s how some of the best and largest companies begin: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/3U-why-build-toys https://www.ycombinator.com/library/3U-why-build-toys
- fullshark 5y agoThe Star Trek TNG episode "The Game" comes to mind
- pingeroo 5y agoWaiting for someone to get doom running on one of these bad boys.
- kangaroozach 5y agoFive years ago with Magic Leap where it was I thought we were 5 years out from retina full FOV AR. After seeing this, I’d give it another 5 years. But that’s wild to think about.
- londons_explore 5y agoHow Snapchat has grown up...
- skc 5y agoNow begins the search for the killer app.
- eloeffler 5y agoPlease offer a way to change the website language (a button in the top or so). Especially if you don't have professional translators. It looks like the "Kreatoren" of your website used auto-translation for the German version and it makes it look like a scam. (imo there is no good direct translation for creator in this context, the entire text would need to be recreated).
- chmod775 5y agoHah. I was about to point this out and found your comment right at the top. > imo there is no good direct translation for creator in this context With this specifically I disagree. There are some perfectly good words, but since we get buried in anglicisms every day they tend to be way at the back of people's minds. I also don't think this is auto-translation, because it's a very human mistake. A machine would have translated the word as "Schöpfer" or if it was context aware as "Urheber". A human may have also chosen "Kreative" or even "Macher" (a favorite of the ad instustry!) instead.
- eloeffler 5y agoKreative is good though it still sounds a bit "wooden" :) I went through Leo translations and didn't find one that fit. I think "Macher" would miss the point though. And yes, it makes sense that this is a human translation given that "Kreator" is a very creative translation, hah.
- throwaddzuzxd 5y agoWhy does the webpage animation move on scroll? Why is it not just a video? Most trendy product websites do this now (including Apple), but I can't figure out why? As a user, it feels extremely laggy since I don't scroll perfectly smoothly. I feel like they would have a better grip on the smoothness of the rendering if it was a simple video? I also don't like it because it feels like I have to scroll "hard" for the page to scroll down. What's the benefit of this? I genuinely would like to know.