Camera glasses have long been something we've been interested in at Digital Camera World, as our name might suggest. These wearable smart devices have become particularly popular in the last year or so thanks to Meta and Ray-Ban – but yesterday's announcement from Snap has moved the technology on in a big way.
Since the parent company for Snapchat first launched its Spectacles back in 2016, the market for wearable eyewear cameras has started to build, with Ray-Ban's Meta Headliner Gen 2 glasses currently the ones to beat.
But Snap's new Specs, announced yesterday at the Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California, represent a genuine step forward. Because what we're talking about is not just a camera on your face, but a full-blown heads-up display, built into a pair of glasses you could actually wear in public.
This all comes at a price, though: at $2,195 / £1,995, these are not an impulse buy. For context, that's more than a Sony A7C II body, more than a DJI Mavic 3 Pro, and more than double the price of Ray-Ban Meta Display (which is the closest rival with a heads-up display available in the market at the momen.
Still, it's pretty darned incredible what Snap has managed to squeeze into something that's at least recognisably spectacle-shaped. The Specs are fully standalone – no tether to a phone and no external battery puck – which puts them in a different class from competitors such as Xreal's Project Aura.
They weigh between 132g and 136g depending on which of the two frame sizes you choose, which is roughly twice the weight of the Ray-Ban Meta Display glasses but considerably lighter than any AR headset. First-person impressions from the show floor described them as pretty chunky, but not unreasonably so for what's packed inside.
What the display actually does
The display system is where things get interesting for anyone who thinks seriously about optics. Snap uses its own proprietary liquid crystal on silicon technology, delivering a 51-degree field of view and 16 million colours. To put that in terms photographers will recognise, the company claims it's equivalent to a 24-inch desktop monitor when you're working, or a 115-inch screen placed 10 feet away when you're watching video. That's not a floating thumbnail: it's a practical, usable display.
The waveguide (the optical component that carries light from the display to your eye) uses billions of nanostructures so small that more than 10,000 of them fit on the tip of a human hair. Snap has also borrowed electrochromic lens tech from Boeing 787 Dreamliner windows, allowing the lenses to shift from clear to tinted in around 10 seconds. Which is either a neat party trick or a useful privacy feature. Or possibly both.
Motion-to-photon latency, meanwhile, is claimed at 7 milliseconds, verified through robotic measurement systems. That's fast enough that digital overlays should feel anchored to the real world rather than swimming around it, which has historically been the case with AR systems.
What's the camera like?
When it comes to photography, there's a world-facing camera with an LED indicator that lights up when recording is active. That's a direct response to privacy criticisms that have followed smart glasses from Google Glass onwards. Users retain control over what gets stored, synced, shared or deleted.
Snap hasn't published a camera sensor spec sheet like you'd get from a dedicated camera manufacturer, which is a small frustration. But what I can tell you is that the glasses are powered by two Qualcomm Snapdragon processors, one dedicated to computer vision and one to running apps, so the processing grunt is clearly there. Battery life is around four hours of mixed use, with the included charging case providing four additional full charges. That should add up, in theory at least, to 20 hours of total use.
Most people are still not ready for AR glasses, and while I haven't tried Specs myself, my guess is that this won't change overnight. In fact, I question whether the average person has any interest at all in strapping a camera to their face. Then again, serious people are investing serious money into this tech, so maybe they know something I don't.
Either way, if you're an enthusiastic early adopter, the immediate point of comparison is the Ray-Ban Meta Display glasses, which offer a similar concept at roughly half the price, yet without the full AR display functionality. Your choice of device will also depend where you are in the world. Meta's product is currently US-only, while Snap's Specs will ship to the US, the UK and France this autumn.
Pre-orders for Specs are open now at specs.com with a refundable deposit. Whether these represent the future of wearable camera glasses or another tech firm pouring billions of VC capital down the drain, we'll have a clearer view once we've had a proper hands-on. Watch this space.
See our guide to the best camera glasses
