6 ms·

From 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

From 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 ago
Can you say anything about potential applications? What do you think will be the killer app for this?
- jeffbee 5y ago
  What would be any app for this? It's not immediately apparent why anyone would want this.
  - stevewodil 5y ago
    Turn 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 ago
      sounds dangerous to wear AR glasses while driving
      - gotostatement 5y ago
        lol only on hacker news would this statement be controversial
    - ffggvv 5y ago
      would be coool while walking. alot of cars already have HUDs like that overlayed onto the windshield
  - vineyardmike 5y ago
    Do you understand why anyone would use existing Snapchat filters? If not, then of course you wouldn’t understand the Spectacles.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - sixothree 5y ago
    Sounds like a lack of imagination. Construction - Show size/length of objects, show if object is level, highlight location of needed tool. Navigation - Show arrow on top of uber/lyft, show directions. Show restaurant cleanliness score and rating. Food safety - Show how long food has been out of fridge Social - remind you of a persons name
    - mrfusion 5y ago
      It would make a cool ikea app to guide you to the right part and highlight where it goes
      - sixothree 5y ago
        or spot a lost object in your home.
    - mncharity 5y ago
      > Social - remind you of a persons name There was an MIT startup years ago, based on the observation that for some (impaired?) population, when glasses flashed a name, if it was correct, name recall improved, but if it was wrong, there was no negative impact. So low-accuracy recognition was ok.
- upwardbound 5y ago
  This page has several videos of potential applications: https://www.spectacles.com/creators https://www.spectacles.com/creators Deep links: Fitness: https://youtu.be/trd2LT8-G3Y https://youtu.be/trd2LT8-G3Y Travel: https://youtu.be/bzTfMoyBdlM https://youtu.be/bzTfMoyBdlM Learning dance moves: https://storage.googleapis.com/spectacles-v3/NzVlNzU3OWQtY2U2Ny00OGQ3LTljMGEtMGU4MmQ2ZDY0NDcx/creators/people/kat-video_1.mp4 https://storage.googleapis.com/spectacles-v3/NzVlNzU3OWQtY2U... 3D paint: https://storage.googleapis.com/spectacles-v3/NzVlNzU3OWQtY2U2Ny00OGQ3LTljMGEtMGU4MmQ2ZDY0NDcx/creators/people/matt-video_1.mp4 https://storage.googleapis.com/spectacles-v3/NzVlNzU3OWQtY2U...
  - noja 5y ago
    Interesting how all these example videos are outside, but I can't see that really happening: outside are other people to bump into, surfaces to pay attention to, hazards. I don't want to learn to dance while standing distracted next to the edge of a cliff.
    - orangepanda 5y ago
      Good that you can still see the edge of a cliff then, no?
      - noja 5y ago
        Ideal.
- jedmeyers 5y ago
  Catching pokemon with those should be fun.
- pkaye 5y ago
  I have hearing aids and know how bad they can be in noisy environments. I wish there were glasses that captioned what it heard to assist in comprehension. Might be useful for those whose hearing loss progressed a lot. The only caution is one must not rely on them too much or your listening skills will degrade.
- swiley 5y ago
  being able to position X11 (or wayland, I don't care really) windows in space and not have to deal with monitors would sell them for me.
  - jayd16 5y ago
    You can do this on some of the VR and AR headsets already. The resolution is just almost but not quite good enough. Its getting there though.
- langitbiru 5y ago
  Conversation helper. Imagine you talk to a person. It can give you a list of ice breakers to open up the conversation based on the person's appearance and surroundings. It can alert you whether the person is not comfortable or very attracted to you. Some people like to miss these subtle cues. You can combine this AR technology with Deep Learning technology such as Pose Tracker. https://blog.tensorflow.org/2021/05/next-generation-pose-detection-with-movenet-and-tensorflowjs.html https://blog.tensorflow.org/2021/05/next-generation-pose-det...
  - upwardbound 5y ago
    Although I can only speak for myself and not for Snap, I would discourage these ideas. I think these ideas are a violation of the privacy rights of the person you are looking at. If I were on the Lens review team I would reject these lenses.
ugh123 5y ago
Why do they need to look so rectangular and retro (and not in a good way)? Is it due to the hardware & circuitry inside? Hope the eventual goal is to make these more appealing. I'd rather not everyone around me know these are what they really are.
- upwardbound 5y ago
  Great question. Today's waveguide technology requires flat glass. (This is public information - Karl Guttag's blog covers the topic very well). Product designers have to either make the glasses flat (like Spectacles V4) or make the glasses much bulkier to hide the flat waveguides (like the front of Magic Leap). If added bulk were just a question of size, maybe that wouldn't be such an issue, but for a head-worn product every single gram of mass is important to optimize away.
  - ugh123 5y ago
    Thank you
slg 5y ago
It is good to see the brightness improving, but as someone who has played around with some AR devices I think AR is still waiting for the FOV to take a leap forward before these have mainstream appeal. It is just so unnatural when objects disappear from view if you aren't looking directly at them. This isn't as big of a problem in VR when your peripheral vision is just black and therefore your mind can easily learn to ignore it. You still see the world normally with AR and therefore are constantly reminded of the areas in your vision that won't see the augmentations. Side note, props to Snap for being honest about this in their marketing material. For example, the FOV is noticeably limited in this video[1]. Lots of companies tend to dishonestly crop the image or blow up the augmentation so the FOV looks larger. [1] - https://twitter.com/Spectacles/status/1395439601590833156 https://twitter.com/Spectacles/status/1395439601590833156
- anonymouse008 5y ago
  > It is good to see the brightness improving, but as someone who has played around with some AR devices I think AR is still waiting for the FOV to take a leap forward before these have mainstream appeal. Or just potentially not look ridiculous - or if ridiculous, at least an admirable ridiculousness. The most brilliant 'AR' concepts I've seen are the mesh of highest form of a mature technology with a dash of new software and most directed intent -- aka Voice Home Assistants, DynamicLand, iBeacons/AirTags, Whole Foods eink displays, Projection Mapping, Google's recent 'be there project' for example. Those concepts are going to gel together inside someone's mobile platform API (iOS or Android) and become AR without glasses - and be more compelling than wearing a display. I'm firmly in the camp that displays will be nice, but not must haves for AR.
- willidiots 5y ago
  As a former Glass user, agreed on the need for FOV. While amazing, current AR doesn't feel like "augmented reality", it feels like "tiny transparent phone screen in your eye".
- Groxx 5y ago
  Yeah, that video looks very representative of what I'd expect, from trying a few AR platforms. The HoloLens and Magic Leap promo material was absurdly misleading in this respect - IRL the viewports feel tiny and the image is dim and low resolution. I'd be hesitant to call them outright lies... if they were anything but obvious, outright lies.
an_opabinia 5y ago
Has any improvement been made on your guys approach to application processes? My experience with "Yellow LA" was such utter unprofessional, nepotistic, myopic, self aggrandizing bullshit. What is the compelling reason to revisit that for allocating commodity electronics?
- upwardbound 5y ago
  That sucks, I'm sorry to hear that. If it helps, the people reviewing these applications are different than the Yellow people, and are really nice. Also there are more of these glasses to go around than there are Yellow spots. In terms of process, Snap has during the past 12 months made a sustained and well-funded push for racial and gender equality, and that should help a lot to make nepotism impossible in the new process. Here's an important example of Snap's racial equality initiatives: https://www.axios.com/snapchat-cameras-overhaul-racism-6a01b1a0-567e-4660-b19a-7f0a00922374.html https://www.axios.com/snapchat-cameras-overhaul-racism-6a01b... Another example, which is not featured in the press but I am very proud of, is that 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"
  - digitalsin 5y ago
    Well I'm glad the woke virtue signaling has been built into the price and doesn't cost extra. "The camera is, in fact, racist,.." -Snap engineer Bertrand Saint-Preux Seriously??? Also, I find female voices more soothing. My wife on the other hand prefers male voices in a Scottish accent with her digital assistants. She doesn't now associate male scots with just being an assistant. For crying out loud it's just a damn preference.
reasonabl_human 5y ago
Most 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.
alasdair_ 5y ago
2000 nits is impressive! I have a monitor that has peak nits of 1500 and even at a normal viewing distance it’s almost too bright. 2000 should be enough to work in all but the brightest sunlight.

From 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 ago

Can you say anything about potential applications? What do you think will be the killer app for this?

jeffbee 5y ago
What would be any app for this? It's not immediately apparent why anyone would want this.
- stevewodil 5y ago
  Turn 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 ago
    sounds dangerous to wear AR glasses while driving
    - gotostatement 5y ago
      lol only on hacker news would this statement be controversial
  - ffggvv 5y ago
    would be coool while walking. alot of cars already have HUDs like that overlayed onto the windshield
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  Do you understand why anyone would use existing Snapchat filters? If not, then of course you wouldn’t understand the Spectacles.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- sixothree 5y ago
  Sounds like a lack of imagination. Construction - Show size/length of objects, show if object is level, highlight location of needed tool. Navigation - Show arrow on top of uber/lyft, show directions. Show restaurant cleanliness score and rating. Food safety - Show how long food has been out of fridge Social - remind you of a persons name
  - mrfusion 5y ago
    It would make a cool ikea app to guide you to the right part and highlight where it goes
    - sixothree 5y ago
      or spot a lost object in your home.
  - mncharity 5y ago
    > Social - remind you of a persons name There was an MIT startup years ago, based on the observation that for some (impaired?) population, when glasses flashed a name, if it was correct, name recall improved, but if it was wrong, there was no negative impact. So low-accuracy recognition was ok.
upwardbound 5y ago
This page has several videos of potential applications: https://www.spectacles.com/creators https://www.spectacles.com/creators Deep links: Fitness: https://youtu.be/trd2LT8-G3Y https://youtu.be/trd2LT8-G3Y Travel: https://youtu.be/bzTfMoyBdlM https://youtu.be/bzTfMoyBdlM Learning dance moves: https://storage.googleapis.com/spectacles-v3/NzVlNzU3OWQtY2U2Ny00OGQ3LTljMGEtMGU4MmQ2ZDY0NDcx/creators/people/kat-video_1.mp4 https://storage.googleapis.com/spectacles-v3/NzVlNzU3OWQtY2U... 3D paint: https://storage.googleapis.com/spectacles-v3/NzVlNzU3OWQtY2U2Ny00OGQ3LTljMGEtMGU4MmQ2ZDY0NDcx/creators/people/matt-video_1.mp4 https://storage.googleapis.com/spectacles-v3/NzVlNzU3OWQtY2U...
- noja 5y ago
  Interesting how all these example videos are outside, but I can't see that really happening: outside are other people to bump into, surfaces to pay attention to, hazards. I don't want to learn to dance while standing distracted next to the edge of a cliff.
  - orangepanda 5y ago
    Good that you can still see the edge of a cliff then, no?
    - noja 5y ago
      Ideal.
jedmeyers 5y ago
Catching pokemon with those should be fun.
pkaye 5y ago
I have hearing aids and know how bad they can be in noisy environments. I wish there were glasses that captioned what it heard to assist in comprehension. Might be useful for those whose hearing loss progressed a lot. The only caution is one must not rely on them too much or your listening skills will degrade.
swiley 5y ago
being able to position X11 (or wayland, I don't care really) windows in space and not have to deal with monitors would sell them for me.
- jayd16 5y ago
  You can do this on some of the VR and AR headsets already. The resolution is just almost but not quite good enough. Its getting there though.
langitbiru 5y ago
Conversation helper. Imagine you talk to a person. It can give you a list of ice breakers to open up the conversation based on the person's appearance and surroundings. It can alert you whether the person is not comfortable or very attracted to you. Some people like to miss these subtle cues. You can combine this AR technology with Deep Learning technology such as Pose Tracker. https://blog.tensorflow.org/2021/05/next-generation-pose-detection-with-movenet-and-tensorflowjs.html https://blog.tensorflow.org/2021/05/next-generation-pose-det...
- upwardbound 5y ago
  Although I can only speak for myself and not for Snap, I would discourage these ideas. I think these ideas are a violation of the privacy rights of the person you are looking at. If I were on the Lens review team I would reject these lenses.

ugh123 5y ago

Why do they need to look so rectangular and retro (and not in a good way)? Is it due to the hardware & circuitry inside? Hope the eventual goal is to make these more appealing. I'd rather not everyone around me know these are what they really are.

upwardbound 5y ago
Great question. Today's waveguide technology requires flat glass. (This is public information - Karl Guttag's blog covers the topic very well). Product designers have to either make the glasses flat (like Spectacles V4) or make the glasses much bulkier to hide the flat waveguides (like the front of Magic Leap). If added bulk were just a question of size, maybe that wouldn't be such an issue, but for a head-worn product every single gram of mass is important to optimize away.
- ugh123 5y ago
  Thank you

slg 5y ago

It is good to see the brightness improving, but as someone who has played around with some AR devices I think AR is still waiting for the FOV to take a leap forward before these have mainstream appeal. It is just so unnatural when objects disappear from view if you aren't looking directly at them. This isn't as big of a problem in VR when your peripheral vision is just black and therefore your mind can easily learn to ignore it. You still see the world normally with AR and therefore are constantly reminded of the areas in your vision that won't see the augmentations. Side note, props to Snap for being honest about this in their marketing material. For example, the FOV is noticeably limited in this video[1]. Lots of companies tend to dishonestly crop the image or blow up the augmentation so the FOV looks larger. [1] - https://twitter.com/Spectacles/status/1395439601590833156 https://twitter.com/Spectacles/status/1395439601590833156

anonymouse008 5y ago
> It is good to see the brightness improving, but as someone who has played around with some AR devices I think AR is still waiting for the FOV to take a leap forward before these have mainstream appeal. Or just potentially not look ridiculous - or if ridiculous, at least an admirable ridiculousness. The most brilliant 'AR' concepts I've seen are the mesh of highest form of a mature technology with a dash of new software and most directed intent -- aka Voice Home Assistants, DynamicLand, iBeacons/AirTags, Whole Foods eink displays, Projection Mapping, Google's recent 'be there project' for example. Those concepts are going to gel together inside someone's mobile platform API (iOS or Android) and become AR without glasses - and be more compelling than wearing a display. I'm firmly in the camp that displays will be nice, but not must haves for AR.
willidiots 5y ago
As a former Glass user, agreed on the need for FOV. While amazing, current AR doesn't feel like "augmented reality", it feels like "tiny transparent phone screen in your eye".
Groxx 5y ago
Yeah, that video looks very representative of what I'd expect, from trying a few AR platforms. The HoloLens and Magic Leap promo material was absurdly misleading in this respect - IRL the viewports feel tiny and the image is dim and low resolution. I'd be hesitant to call them outright lies... if they were anything but obvious, outright lies.

an_opabinia 5y ago

Has any improvement been made on your guys approach to application processes? My experience with "Yellow LA" was such utter unprofessional, nepotistic, myopic, self aggrandizing bullshit. What is the compelling reason to revisit that for allocating commodity electronics?

upwardbound 5y ago
That sucks, I'm sorry to hear that. If it helps, the people reviewing these applications are different than the Yellow people, and are really nice. Also there are more of these glasses to go around than there are Yellow spots. In terms of process, Snap has during the past 12 months made a sustained and well-funded push for racial and gender equality, and that should help a lot to make nepotism impossible in the new process. Here's an important example of Snap's racial equality initiatives: https://www.axios.com/snapchat-cameras-overhaul-racism-6a01b1a0-567e-4660-b19a-7f0a00922374.html https://www.axios.com/snapchat-cameras-overhaul-racism-6a01b... Another example, which is not featured in the press but I am very proud of, is that 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"
- digitalsin 5y ago
  Well I'm glad the woke virtue signaling has been built into the price and doesn't cost extra. "The camera is, in fact, racist,.." -Snap engineer Bertrand Saint-Preux Seriously??? Also, I find female voices more soothing. My wife on the other hand prefers male voices in a Scottish accent with her digital assistants. She doesn't now associate male scots with just being an assistant. For crying out loud it's just a damn preference.

reasonabl_human 5y ago

Most 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.

alasdair_ 5y ago

2000 nits is impressive! I have a monitor that has peak nits of 1500 and even at a normal viewing distance it’s almost too bright. 2000 should be enough to work in all but the brightest sunlight.