New Snap Specs revealed: Are augmented reality glasses the next must-have accessory for Londoners?

For years we’ve been wondering: what is going to be the next big gadget to change the world, after the smartphone did just that years ago? And change in a positive sense — not just bring it to an end, as AI apparently is hell bent on doing.

Smart and AR glasses are this end-times era’s top candidate. Until recently all many of them did was play music and let you take photos and videos worse than your phone could manage, but the Snap Specs are here to change all that.

Snap has made legit sci-fi grade augmented reality glasses for five years and the Snap Specs take things mainstream. You may not be able to afford them, at a fiver under two grand, but you’ll soon be able to buy them. Pre-orders are open now.

I’ve had a play with a pair to see exactly how AR smart glasses may — or may not — help the average Londoner go about their day.

The most important bit to start with is in addressing how the Snap Specs are different to the smart glasses many of you may have clocked out on London streets already, the Meta Ray-Ban. That set looks like an ordinary pair of glasses but has a speaker, microphone and camera baked in. The Snap Specs takes the tech forward a few light years with an actual display in your field of vision.

Yep, even though they serve wannabe fashion specs vibes rather than VR headset stylings, the experience here can be like actual virtual reality when you want it to be.

The Snap Specs place what’s known as a waveguide display within each glasses lens. This involves basically projecting an image into your eyes. And that means while you see the equivalent of a screen hanging in your vision, other folks don’t see what you see. And the list of places in which you can realistically use a pair of Snap Specs isn’t limited in the way an Apple Vision Pro or Meta Quest 3 is.

You can still see what’s around you, and it’s not the view of a tiny little camera projected onto a display as it is in sight-blocking AR gadgets either. Those lenses? They're clear (ish).

The Snap Specs weigh around 130g, which is a quarter the weight of a Meta Quest 3, around a sixth the heft of an Apple Vision Pro. Real talk: 130g is still several times the weight of the average pair of glasses, and to compensate the Snap Specs’ stems do have a fairly firm hold of your head, behind your ears.

And those stems are not skinny, what with each housing a mini computer — a design that handily keeps the weight balance just about perfect as far as I can tell.

You can choose for yourself whether you’d want to be seen out in public wearing them. But I’m honestly not sure I’d feel more self-conscious using the Snap Specs on a train journey versus pulling out my Steam Deck.

That such a comparison is in any way valid makes it clear: we’re not dealing with glasses in the lineage of the Ray-Ban Meta in the Snap Specs. They're as much a PC as they are glasses. And here are some of the ways we can picture using them around London, which I've test driven.

Checking emails

These smart glasses don’t just have a full VR-style interface, there’s an app store and a fully-fledged web browser.

And how do you control it? With your hands. Get your pointer finger out and it becomes a cursor in the display. Open up a palm and interface shortcuts light up on its surface — you prod them like buttons to move about the UI.

You can ask the Specs’s AI assistant to take you to specific sites, or can type away with your fingers mid-air on a virtual keyboard. Yes, you will look a bit odd doing this on the Tube.

Writing docs on the train

People often say it’s movies that show up a great screen versus a bad one. But you know what really shows a display at its most useful? A plain old document. Few things have the potential to look as scraggly as small fonts on a pixel-poor monitor.

But you know what? While the Snap Specs don’t have a gangbusters 4K screen — we may be a generation or two away from that tech getting small enough for glasses like these — writing up some notes on Google Docs felt totally at home.

No, you don’t have to “air type” on a virtual keyboard. The Snap Specs can hook up to an ordinary Bluetooth keyboard, becoming a portable PC rig even the most cramped of train seats can’t trip up.

Navigating to a pub or restaurant

The Snap Specs have an in-house mapping app that helps you navigate towards any place you like, Google Maps style. At first it’s much like doing so on a phone app, but with in-air hand gestures rather than a touchscreen. You can search for local points of interest in categories like restaurants and shops, and then are shown a turn-by-turn map route on a floating map screen.

When you start the actual navigation, though, the view takes a step back. A screen showing a video game-like arrow pointing you in the right direction is only visible when you look down. Makes sense: you don’t want your view blocked while walking around busy Soho or Chinatown streets.

The Snap Specs can do this because it has a full set of motion sensors and two cameras, allowing it to root elements to part of yoru vision and, in other use cases, part of the environment. We don’t yet have an app that maps your route onto the actual pavement like the racing line in Forza Horizon, but Snap has actually shown off that in concept already.

Watching a movie on the train home

Snap does not claim the Specs are like having a personal cinema but they are surprisingly good for that job and are way less obtrusive than a VR headset. I got to try watching a bit of The Pitt on HBO Max, which is one of the two streaming services confirmed for support so far, alongside YouTube.

Thanks to the waveguide display’s 51 degree field of view, you can arrange the image to appear larger than it would on a 50-inch TV in the average living room. And it’s sure going to beat staring into the back of a train seat on the way home from work.

I got to try the Specs’ video streaming in a car, where the seat in front was black, which actually did wonders for the image’s contrast and pop. But as the level of the environment-dimming sunglasses style effect of the lenses is actually adjustable here, you should be able to compensate for the average London train’s dull grey seating. Details, details.

The Snap Specs can connect to Wi-Fi, and there’s a charger case that acts as a mobile hotspot, as well as keeping the things safe when not in use. One of the key messages here is the Specs don’t need your phone in order to work. Snap has partnered with EE in the UK for data plans — cost and details TBC on that one.

Dating in a foreign language

Feeling bold? You could even use the Snap Specs to translate a date with someone who doesn't speak English.

Granted, for them to understand what you're saying we're also going to need a second pair of Snap Specs. And four grand is an expensive date, even factoring in London bar prices.

How it works is pretty neat, though. A set of six microphones live aboard the Snap Specs, which also lets them disambiguate between sound you make versus sound coming from elsewhere.

Fire up the translate app and the mics listen for conversations with another person. Shortly after they've spoken, written text appears below their head, video game style. A whopping 60 languages are supported. The only issue is in reminding yourself to look them in the eye every now and then.

The Snap Specs are due out before the end of the year, and are available to pre-order for £1995.

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