Snap named a waveguide, and said Spectacles are not for sale

What you see

Snap introduced a new generation of Spectacles in April 2024, and its own newsroom announcement describes them as ‘lightweight display glasses, made for creators to overlay their Lenses directly onto the world.’ The company’s product site, live the same month, states the glasses use ‘dual 3D waveguide displays and a 26.3 degree diagonal field of view’ so that ‘immersive AR Lenses are overlaid on the world in front of you,’ with brightness that ‘dynamically adjusts, shining up to 2000 Nits’ for indoor or outdoor use. A wearer sees Snapchat-style augmented graphics layered on their surroundings; a bystander sees only a pair of glasses.

How it works

Snap’s own product page names the mechanism directly as waveguide optics — ‘dual 3D waveguide displays’ — built around a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR1 chip that the newsroom announcement says ‘unlocks the maximum processing power within Spectacles’ lightweight, wearable design.’ The same announcement states the glasses ‘weigh just 134 grams’ and run for ‘approximately 30 minutes per charge,’ and that content is built and pushed to the glasses through Snap’s Lens Studio software for real-time testing by developers.

Viewing conditions and limits

Snap’s own newsroom material is explicit that this generation of Spectacles is not a consumer product: ‘Spectacles aren’t for sale — they’re for augmented reality creators to reimagine the way we communicate, live and explore the world together through AR experiences built in Lens Studio.’ The 30-minute battery life the company states is itself a real operating limit rather than a marketing figure, and the stated 26.3-degree field of view and 2000-nit brightness are the manufacturer’s own numbers, not independently measured in any document reviewed here.

What it is not

Snap’s own vocabulary names a waveguide display and never claims a hologram; the imagery described — Lenses overlaid on the visible world through a 26.3-degree waveguide combiner — is a private, headset-bound augmented-reality display, not a free-space or light-field hologram, and not, by the company’s own statement, a product available for anyone to buy.

• Is the device sold to the public, or distributed only to developers, as Snap states for this generation of Spectacles?
• Is the display named as a waveguide, and is a field-of-view or brightness figure attributed to the manufacturer?
• What battery life or weight figure does the company itself state, and does it match the device’s stated use case?

Snap’s 2024 Spectacles show a company naming its optical mechanism precisely — waveguide displays, a stated field of view — while also being explicit that the result is a developer tool with a 30-minute battery, not a consumer hologram device.