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  • Hacker News
  • Killer app: ad blocker for real life.
  • Congrats to the Specs team for launch. Specs have come a long way since cimagine and looksery, spectacles days. And kudos to Snap for keep pushing.

    - The price is actually competitive. They want to compete with Meta's Orion. However the product is ... lacking. None of the demos actually show-cased the dual wavelength display. The current usecases are available today at Meta Rayban Display for more cheaper and more polish.

    - Dual snapdragon, and i assume one is dedicated to CV alg / scene-understanding/slam, without an external puck, i wonder how the thermal performance would look like.

    - Looks very ugly, C'mon. This is the same team that desigend the original spectacle? where is Evan?

    - I liked the Los Angeles text on the side. well-done.

  • Out of all the possible permutations of display/sensors/processing for AR, I would like to see eyewear with just a Bluetooth-like display and camera/mic. Let me use the phone or watch for all processing. Bonus points for eye tracking and body position sensors. Make the camera tethered if you must and somehow integrate it with my clothes.

    Off course, this would mean less lock-in for everybody and we can't have that.

    by ece
  • > Today, SPECS are available for pre-order at SPECS.COM for $2,195, with a $200 refundable deposit.

    Dayum.

    I do buy into the AR glasses future. They’re insanely cool tech. Meta makes a great one.

    by wxw
  • "Our new waveguide uses billions of invisibly small nanostructures, so small that more than 10,000 can fit on the tip of a single hair. SPECS use the same advanced technology found in Boeing 787 Dreamliner windows, so the electrochromic lenses gently shift from clear to tinted in just 10 seconds."

    This sounds slightly like Texas Instruments DLP (digital light processing) in that there's something actually physically moving. Does anyone have any more info about what this actually is?

  • I think they're chasing the wrong dream. Most of the use cases they're proposing won't suffer much from being attached to a battery/processing puck, and in some cases being attached to a laptop. e.g. I'm not watching a movie while walking down the sidewalk. It would be nice to just sit on a comfy sofa someplace my laptop isn't and watch a movie, but not pay-an-extra-$1800 nice. especially when there are similar devices available where you could buy the device and a dedicated laptop to power it for less.
  • Additive display AR is not a good movie experience anyway.
  • If you want both, you pay for both. If you only want movie watching, something like the XREALs will suit you better. If you want notifications in your face while your phone's in your pocket, and you want to watch that video while standing in line, then this is for you.
  • I think you need to shake up paradigms a bit in order to get true value from these glasses. You genuinely need to start viewing scene understanding abilities, frontier AI model API calls, and seamless hand tracking as core primitives that you combine thoughtfully and not new tech that you chain together hoping to land on a use case.

    Now, the ecosystem and the engine so far were designed for lower stake experiences but to make the purchase of this device worthwhile for average users, they will need Vision Pro app depth of thinking and attention to detail while fitting into the far tighter software and hardware constraints.

    So the key for them is to lower the skill ceiling so creatives can tap into more of the juice, which is why they've announced an Unity to Lens Studio bridge and closed loop agentic coding, while making it more attractive for seasoned developers to use their engine and push its capabilities(native c++ sdk).

    It takes quite a lot, but from what I've seen over a year developing on their kit and watching their platform evolve, their strategy has sound fundamentals. But they urgently need to tap into a broader and more diverse talent pool, like say Blender and Houdini artists, harware & robotics engineers, ML engineers, even music producers and sort of corral their attention into their platform long enough for truly novel and useful applications to emerge.

  • So.... this is weird... but in their video demo it has the address as "2772 State St" but the video was actually taken 100 State Street.... almost 16 blocks away.

    Not only that but the augmented reality images have their "location" on the wrong corner.

    I can understand not wanting to use a real restaurant (i guess?) but if you are faking literally everything then what is even the point of the demo? I sort of assumed it would be an overlay of video taken from the glasses along with the re-created output... but this just seems like they created the visuals after the fact to match the recorded glasses footage.

    Here is a link to their screenshot from the video: https://images.ctfassets.net/o1znirz7lzo4/4CwEXSX8icqDQAtDrD...

    (Note: I would like to thank my years of delivering pizzas in Santa Barbara during college for the knowledge to debunk this video.)

  • At AWE myself and I think the most interesting part of the announcement was how it came right AFTER talking about all of the tools available for porting existing AR experiences to the snap platform and tooling for building new lenses. Stark departure from Apple’s Vision Pro developer strategy, makes me far more likely to build something for it.
  • This but cut out a hole for the camera and <$50 https://www.skmproducts.com/product/original-tv-hat/ :^)
  • > The Original TV Hat works with portable media players, smartphones, Microsoft Zune, Apple iPhone, iPod touch and iPod nano.

    See? It's possible to support older tech

  • Specs will have more data collection and ads though
  • Seeing augmented reality/technology/ads all day through my glasses sounds like a version of hell to me
  • Right. Other than people trying to sell us things, who thinks we should be trending towards being more online instead of less?
  • Makes me think of the short film HYPER-REALITY by Keiichi Matsuda: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs
    by RIMR
  • >Every important computing platform has been defined by what people built with it. The PC became meaningful because developers built software. The web became meaningful because developers built websites. Smartphones became meaningful because developers built apps. We believe augmented reality will be no different.

    At a $2195 price point, it just won't be possible to have an ecosystem. All the other platforms mentioned were orders of magnitude cheaper. That being said, I do think AR has real utility, but the price discovery will take a while

  • Early PCs were VERY expensive at the time.
  • A few tech specs for those who don't want to read through the announcement:

    * 51 degree field of view. Stated as being like you're working at a 24" monitor.

    * 4 hours of mixed-use battery life with the case holding another 20 hours

    * 132/136 grams depending on size

    * Supports prescription lenses, easily interchangeable/swappable

    Priced at $2195 w/ $200 deposit, arrival expected in Fall.

  • Can't find what's the resolution ?

    Found that: The analyst noted the device lacks disclosed specifications for resolution, pixels per degree, brightness, and refresh rate. ( https://m.uk.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/benchmark-... )

    And that: Sixth Generation 2026 - 46 degree diagonal field of view display with a 37 pixel-per-degree resolution (Wikipedia)

    - is it 1702px diagonally = 1200 x 1200 px ??

  • Tech specs for specs tech!