Snap's new Spectacles 5 AR glasses are very large and not for sale – here's why

Snap Inc., developer of the social media platform Snapchat, recently unveiled the fifth generation of its Spectacles AR headset at SPS 2024.

The first thing you’ll notice about the Spectacles 5 is its massive size. According to the company, the new pair are almost three times the size of the Spectacles 4 and weighs 226 grams (a little under half a pound). But bulking up the headset had to be done as Snap made numerous hardware changes that required the extra room.

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While there won’t be an external battery pack and everything is inside the frame, Snap states the device runs on a pair of Qualcomm Snapdragon processors. They support the four cameras at the front which “power the Snap Spatial Engine [for] seamless hand tracking.”

The Spectacles 5’s legs house LCoS (Liquid Crystal on Silicon) micro-projectors that send images directly towards the waveguides inside the lenses. Snap says each lens “delivers a 46-degree diagonal field of view with a 37 pixel-per-degree resolution.” The company equates this to looking at a 100-inch display from about 10 feet away.

CNET makes an interesting point about the headset, noting that the 46-degree viewing angle is fine for glasses like these but for displays on traditional VR headsets, it’s like looking through a window with “the dimensions of a large phone screen.”

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Alongside the Spectacles 5, Snap also announced new partnerships with several third-party companies, most notably OpenAI. Snap says it aims to bring “cloud-hosted multimodal AI models” to its AR headset. So we could see the device support some form of ChatGPT when they finally become available to the public.

The other partners indicate that video games will play an important role in the Spectacles 5. ILM Immersive, for example, is bringing a Star Wars title to the platform.

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It’s unknown when Snap will bring its Spectacles headset to the masses. Despite being the fifth generation, the tech still isn’t ready. The battery only lasts about 45 minutes. 

But if you’re a developer in the US and are interested in trying them out, you can join the Spectacles Developer Program for $99 a month. You’ll get a pair plus tech support from Snap itself.