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.
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.
> Side note, props to Snap for being honest about this in their marketing material.
That struck me too – I don't think I've ever seen marketing for an AR headset where I came away thinking "that's probably what it really looks like" until this. Not only have they not exaggerated the FOV, they also haven't fudged their compositing to give the impression that the optics are somehow able to add shadows or otherwise obscure the background.
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.
> 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.
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".
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?
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-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.
"[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"
This reads to me very sincere and good, and I hope the collaborations go well. At the end of the day building an AR hardware product is extremely risky, and takes a very long time, and it's definitely exciting - it's a great contribution to computing.
This seems very unresponsive and myopic. The issue does not appear to have been diversity but work life balance. What does the gender of the Ai voice have to do with reducing the stress at work ?
Bertrand is black and he's a really good guy who put his heart and soul into the inclusive camera project, of his own initiative, without anyone asking him to do it. What did he do to deserve your mockery?
Exactly my experience as well. I had occasionally heard the term in passing, but it never was more than a minor blip on my radar until I was having a conversation with my outspoken conservative uncle who asked me if I was "woke". (This was years ago, I want to say around 2015 or so.)
I knew vaguely that it was connected to the idea of being aware of social justice issues, but it became clear that what he was really interested in was whether I held the same set of naive, self-righteous, straw-man ideals that are so regularly pilloried in conservative media and labeled as "woke" culture.
For a group that claims to hate identity politics, the right sure is quick to slap labels on everyone and put us against each other.
Snap was also easily my worst job application process ever. Everyone (with one exception) was dismissive and rude and arrogant. I had a interviewer literally laugh in my face when I gave a wrong answer. After the 3-4 hour long series of interviews ended I cried because I felt utterly belittled.
I'm not overly sensitive either, I've been grilled and had tough interviews before at FAANG companies with no problem. They were something else. They also totally ghosted (hah) me when I requested feedback on the interview. Truly horrible experience.
For what it's worth, we had a candidate drop out of our hiring pipeline because they got their dream job at SNAP. The candidate said the interview process was similarly brutal, but hinted that they had secured a large total comp.
The candidate called me several months later asking if we had any openings. He and several of his coworkers were spontaneously laid off, presumably before his stock vesting cliff as well. I remember thinking he seemed awfully dejected on the phone call, a stark contrast to how upbeat he had been earlier.
As with any company, YMMV. That experience stuck with me, though.
Yellow is Snap's incubator for small startups. I don't think that the bad experience the parent commenter had is typical, and from what I've seen of Yellow it seems very well-run. Perhaps the parent might have misinterpreted things to be different than they are and I'm sorry they had a bad experience.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This 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.
I 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?
When 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.
It 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.
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.)
Are 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.
Incidentally 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.
Older 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.
I 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.
Did 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.
Nreal 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.
If 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.
If 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.
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.
It 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.
Hiking 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.
Ok, 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.
If 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.
"[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"
Oh, 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.
Someday consumer grade mobile voice assistants will be feature complete and bulletproof enough that adding a gender-neutral voice will be the highest user value feature to invest limited development resources into.
Based on my recent experience trying to support my elderly mother's desire to "talk to her phone to do things", that day is not imminent.
Alternatively if the voice were male you'd have people complaining that it reinforces the idea that technology is male centric and it further alienates women in tech.
But yeah, I'd love gender neutral voice assistants as well.
>> Having female A.I. assistants perpetuates the gender wage gap by creating the idea that assistant jobs are a women's role.
is there any proof of this or does it just sound true therefore its true? Specifically theres two claims here that i don't see any data backing up:
1. Female voices of AI creates the idea that assistants jobs are a women's role.
2. Assistants jobs being perceived as a woman's role somehow makes the (nonexistent) wage gap worse. Despite the fact that assistants tend to make more money than garbagemen. (a field dominated by men)
There is human factors work on the gender of voice interfaces. A notable real world example is the voice that firmly proposes 'Pull up!' if you're about to fly into the ground in many aircraft.
Wikipedia is missing refs, but here's the entry on choosing the gender of this voice
[edit] originally quoted the first part of the section that cited early work finding women's voices to be more effective, but later work challenges this finding. I removed the quote to avoid implying I believe either way.
thats interesting but nonetheless has no bearing on these specific claims. if anything it counters the claims as it says a female voice is more authoritative whereas the original poster said it makes them seem like an assistant or submissive and somehow affects their wages.
also your example is one where they shaped the assistant based on the humans perception. whereas the poster is claiming the assistant shapes the humans perception.
which doesnt really have anything to do with the point. Just vaguely related to biases inferred from NLP. It also just quotes a few sociology professors who themselves dont provide proof behind their assertions. And then also points to:
By the way, what makes you say the gender wage gap isn't real? To many people that comes across as if you were denying climate change, and decreases your credibility overall. Just trying to engage as best I can.
because the widely quoted figure of 79 cents to a dollar is only if you blindly compare incomes without adjusting for hours, experience, education, or even role.
obviously a part time elementary school teacher with two years experience will make less than a full time investmenet banker that works 80 hours a week and has 10 years experience.
Once you adjust for all the relevant factors the effect completely disappears and there isnt a gap. (with some studies find maybe 1-2% within the margin of error).
so at the very least its very misleading to say they get paid less for the same role and same expereince.
if you want to go into why they may go into different fields or work less hours and how that reflects on society thats fine.
But its grossly misleading to take those nunmbers and blindly compare them and say its "sexism". Actually indian and asian woman make more than white men. So white men must systemically be oppressed. Or maybe they choose different jobs. (i still remember when google had to adjust their L4 software engineer pay to raise mens pay, because women actually made more!)
those things you're adjusting for are part of the problem! If you're going to adjust away all possible explanations of the problem, then of course you won't see the problem anymore!
not really. thats how you isolate a variable. people are postulating the reason for the gap is sexism. so you isolate all the variables until the only difference is sex. and then you see if theres a difference. its basic statistical methodology. in fact alot of people are mistakenly under the impression that women make less for the same role/experience level, which my statistic shows isnt true.
if you dont adjust for something then its just an idiotic comparison. like i said, non-adjusted asian women make more than white men. (so do nigerians) But you arent crying about asian women supremacy. or the the system is racist/sexist against white men.
now of course you can argue "sexism of the gaps". that the reason women choose jobs that make less is sexism itself. but youd have to prove that assertion, and not simply that hey prefer jobs that tend to make less like social work and teaching.
and youd have to explain why the so called wage gap is bigger in the most gender-equal countries like norway and denmark whereas its the smallest in the least equal countries like in the middle east.
just 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.
Fwiw 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.
Your 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.
I didn't knew about that, thanks. In Europe you don't have such thing, so you end up w/ a mountain of NDAs (or just don't care and cross your fingers).
I 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.
Most 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.
The 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.
Why 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.
Please 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).
Hah. 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.
Kreative 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.
The 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)
Oh gotcha. Right now it's a developer platform. It runs any JS code + graphics that you write in Lens Studio. 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.
