By: Nick Gambino
Tech companies have been working on augmented reality Glasses for years. No matter how much money and time they put into these things, they don’t ever seem to crack it. We’ve yet to see any version of AR glasses that are suitable for mass adoption.
Snap is looking to change that which is why they’re still toiling away in R&D. According to The Verge, the tech company is working on a new iteration of Spectacles that they will unveil next month.
Spectacles 5 (yes they’ve made four earlier versions that you’ve heard little about) will most likely continue and expand upon augmented reality features which were only introduced in Spectacles 4.
That version is pretty rough with limited field of view and a battery that lasts less than an hour. Needless to say that was not placed on the shelves for consumers to buy. Instead, they opted to hand out Spectacles glasses to a limited pool of developers to test them out.
Now, if you’re thinking you’re going to finally get your hands on a pair of Spectacles when the 5th-gen is unveiled next month, you should temper those hopes. Apparently, they are still not ready for consumers. Again, they will be tested amongst developers and creators.
Still, they will get a public unveiling on September 17th at the Partner Summit in LA. Who knows if they’ll ever make a pair of glasses we can all get our hands on.
Meta is likewise working on a new pair of AR glasses as part of their partnership with Ray-Ban. This will be the first for Meta who has been going all in on VR and the metaverse in recent years. The Orion AR glasses, like Snap Spectacles, will only get an unveiling but will not be ready for purchase.
From functionality to privacy concerns, there’s a lot of kinks to still be worked out before we see augmented reality glasses in the wild. For now, we’ll just have to play the wait-and-see game as numerous tech companies work to get their respective products up to square one.
