Snap Inc on Wednesday launched fifth generation of spectacles, and ‘Snap OS’. According to CEO Evan Spiegel, the spectacles will work seamlessly on mobile devices via the ‘Spectacles’ application.
The Snap spectacles, powered by Snap OS, are packed into AR glasses that weigh less than half the weight of a typical VR headset at only 226 grams. They are equipped with four cameras and enable hand tracking.
On the other hand, the Snap OS has been designed and built from the ground up and leverages its proprietary technology, Liquid Crystal on Silicon (LCoS) micro-projectors, and waveguides, creating vivid, sharp images both indoors or outdoors – even in direct sunlight. The Optical Engine delivers a 46-degree diagonal field of view with a 37 pixel per degree similar to a 100-inch display just 10 feet away, according to Snap.
The other features of the spectacles include its dual system-on-a-chip architecture.
With two Snapdragon processors from Qualcomm, this infrastructure splits the compute workload across the two processors. The spectacles work alongside titanium chambers to improve heat dissipation.
Spectacles deliver up to 45 minutes of continuous standalone runtime. The company has partnered with OpenAI, “to give developers access to powerful multimodal large language models”.
The CEO said that spectacles will be available from today onwards as part of the Spectacles Developer Program.
According to Snap Inc., more than 375,000 AR creators, developers, and teams from nearly every country in the world have built over 4 million lenses. In just the last year, Snapchatters have engaged with Lenses made by our AR community more than 4.5 trillion times.
On creators, the company said the posting has more than tripled over the past year.
“Creators have garnered trillions of views on the Snaps in their Stories, and now, more than 500 million people watch Spotlight videos. Every day, there are nearly 15 billion interactions between creators and their fans on Snapchat,”Snap Inc said.