According to a report BorderBoth Snapchat and Meta will debut new AR glasses next month. Both companies have been working on such projects for years.
Accordingly The Verge Alex Heath, Snapchat's parent company Snap Inc., will unveil its fifth-generation 'Spectacles' AR glasses at the company's annual Partner Summit conference in Los Angeles on September 17. Just a week later, Meta will unveil its own AR glasses (codenamed Orion, according to Heath) at its annual Connect conference on September 25.
Snap has been developing its 'Spectacles' smart glasses line for several years now, but it wasn't until the device's fourth generation in 2021 that it got real AR capabilities. Now the company is said to be ready to announce the fifth-generation Spectacles, which will further expand the device's AR uses.
Similarly, Meta has been developing and improving its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses since the first generation in 2021. The second generation of the device was released late last year, but the company has yet to add a display or sensor for any AR capabilities.
While both companies are racing toward a future where they believe AR glasses will be mainstream, Heath writes that the devices being shown next month aren’t ready for productization yet. At best, they’ll be offered to developers to experiment with before a future version of the product reaches consumers.
According to Heath, Snap's latest AR glasses will be very similar to the previous generation, but with an improved field of view and battery life. This is certainly welcome considering the first pair only had a 26.3° diagonal field of view (not even half of what you'd find in a modern MRI headset) and a 30-minute battery life (not even half of what you'd find in a modern MRI headset!).
As for Meta’s first real AR glasses, we’ve heard the company hint that “nothing can prepare you for the high field of view immersion,” but it’s still unclear whether the field of view will be large compared to other AR glasses or whether it will actually come close to the current bar set by VR headsets. It’s also unclear whether Meta’s AR glasses will be offered as another partnership with Ray-Ban or if the device will use Meta’s branding, similar to the Quest.
While both companies ultimately aim to produce AR headsets with the incredibly immersive capabilities we've seen in MRI devices like the Vision Pro and Quest 3, packing those capabilities into anything close to a pair of glasses is still a huge challenge.
Top-of-the-range devices like the Magic Leap 2 still look more like bulky spectacles than glasses, and that's despite the majority of processing power and battery being transferred to a pocketable 'disc'.
For more information and insight into Snap and Meta's plans to announce new AR glasses next month, check out Alex Heath's report.