This year there will be two companies which will take leadership in AR & XR (passthrough standalone VR glasses).
AR - Snap spectacles (~2500$)
• strong OS, good spatial anchoring, full stereoscopic view.
Pico - Project Swan (~2500$)
• detachable compute unit, 4k, light
Both will show their devices at AWE.
Today we are launching Music v2.
Better vocals, instrumentation, and arrangement across every genre, improved multilingual support plus capabilities that weren't possible before.
Thinking about Snap Spectacles, which are reportedly launching soon at around $2,500.
They'll be the first standalone true AR glasses from a major tech company. In terms of hardware, definitely best in class.
But what Snap has actually built is more interesting than purely the device and its capabilities itself, however impressive.
Snap has spent years building a dev community of creators and small businesses, through their bespoke SDK Lens Studio, while Snap OS handles rendering and core interactions. its a pretty frictionless building experience, and very easy to pick up. So hardware and software are built by the same company, same reason Apple's ecosystem is sticky.
And the financial layer is just as significant. You can already earn subscription revenue through Lens+ Payouts, performance bonuses via Top Performer Payouts, and client distribution through Camera Kit. Commerce Kit goes further, letting select creators accept payments directly inside Lenses: paid lenses, digital goods, premium features.
Snap already has 15 million paying Snapchat+ subscribers. The monetization rails are already there.
The Apple comparison isn't just hardware plus software. It's a closed ecosystem where developers can build a real business. App Store economics, applied to AR. That's what Snap has been quietly constructing for years.
More at @ARealityEvent during Evan Spiegel's keynote. @LensStudioDev@Snap@Spectacles
The Snap Specs standalone true AR glasses will launch this fall, veteran tech journalist Alex Heath reports, priced around $2500:
https://t.co/2QeQgpRjv7
Routines - A Home OS to help create good habits
This lens contains a journal entree, body profile, calorie counter, exercise progression system and daily calorie intake. It also has an AI assistant which you can ask questions about anything and knows all about your inputs.
Try it yourself using the link below if you have Spectacles glasses, if not, the lens will be available on consumer devices soon ✨
https://t.co/CVE8bcWxfi
New Meta Subreddit for AI glasses developers!
We’re excited to open this to support the growth of the AI glasses developers community. You now have a place to share your projects and connect with others. We’ll also share announcements and updates there.
https://t.co/lk3YCu6yaa
The future of gamedev is just greybox environments, with one of many LLM powered filters applied to it by the player. Your game mechanic existing in many different visual styles.
For note, it seems that the "Panel Grab with Hand Tracking" change refers to the fact that you can now grab windows with a grip gesture, rather than just pinch, and you can do so without directly grabbing the window handle.
I’m hoping that under Ternus, we will see a cheaper Apple Vision headset.
The Vision Pro is honestly a dream product for me. But the barrier for I and most people is the price.
Bringing it down to like $1.5K would make it still niche, but more accessible for more enthusiasts.
🕶️ Spectacles Community Challenge #11 Winners are live!
From brand-new Lenses built from scratch, to major updates evolving existing projects, to open-source tools shaping what’s next, this edition shows the full spectrum of creativity across the ecosystem 🌐
Full list of winners 🔗https://t.co/eH8xNodveN
I cannot understand why people think Meta spent 80 billion dollars on Horizon Worlds. Meta's "Reality Labs" had a horde of experts doing state-of-the-art VR/AR/MR/XR, wearables & tracking hardware R&D. And huge teams of graphics researchers doing amazing work (hundreds of papers at top conferences, SIGGAPH etc). Built and shipped 20 million headsets. Published ~300 thirdparty games. Lots of Meta AI research was done under Reality Labs too, I believe.
And yes they also made a shitty metaverse thing. But it was never just that, and saying this money was "wasted" is stupid. R & D costs money, and a ton of it was contributed back to the public domain.
Hardware innovation has been most successful when it is built around a community. @Snap have done this well with @Spectacles imo.
"... they build a brand by starting with early adopters, and working with those passionate early enthusiasts."
@evanspiegel talking to @davidsenra
We've been working on something calm and beautiful. A puzzle game for anyone who needs a moment of stillness in their day. Tonae. Coming soon to the Apple Vision Pro #AppleVisionPro