New Snapchat AR spectacles are here, but not for you

Snap has offered smart glasses for a while now, letting you record video for Snapchat. The company previously launched augmented reality (AR) glasses a few years ago, and it’s now launched a new pair of Snapchat Spectacles with AR capabilities.

Snapchat announced the fifth-generation Spectacles at its Snap Partner Summit, and these are chunky glasses with a huge frame and thick arms. This thicker design accommodates two Snapdragon processors, vapor chamber cooling, and four cameras to power the screen and hand tracking. Either way, this is more conspicuous than the Ray-Ban Meta glasses and the firm’s previous Spectacles.

The star of the show is arguably the see-through AR display, powered by a pair of micro-projectors. Snap claims that the display is equivalent to viewing images on a 100-inch screen from 10 feet (three meters) away. The company says you can mirror your phone screen to this display, use your phone as a game controller with Lenses running on the display, and more.

The glasses are powered by the company’s Snap OS platform, which supports hand gestures or voice commands. Snap also confirmed that the platform will soon gain support for OpenAI’s cloud-based AI models. All of this hardware and software comes at the cost of battery life, as the company says you can expect 45 minutes of continuous runtime. By comparison, the firm’s original AR glasses offered 30 minutes of runtime.

Unfortunately, the fifth-generation Snapchat Spectacles isn’t meant for general consumers. Snap says the product is available via its Spectacles Developer Program for $99 a month. Yep, that’s not a typo.

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