SAN FRANCISCO: Snap, the parent company of social network Snapchat, on Tuesday launched its Specs augmented reality glasses, a major bet by a struggling company to stake out ground in the post-smartphone era.<\/p>\n
Unveiled at the Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California, the Specs are the first standalone augmented reality glasses aimed at the general public, according to the company.<\/p>\n
They will go on sale in the fall in the United States, the United Kingdom and France, and can be reserved starting Tuesday for US$2,195 (RM8,922).<\/p>\n
Snap is targeting a middle ground: glasses more sophisticated than the models offered by Meta and soon Google, which CEO Evan Spiegel sees more as a “phone accessory,” and less bulky and costly than headsets, which he called “very capable and immersive, but … cumbersome to wear and shut you out of the world.”<\/p>\n
“Ultimately we believe that unless we can bring computing into the world where we live … it’s going to be very, very hard to make it feel more human,” Spiegel told AFP.<\/p>\n
The difference is in how they work: glasses like Meta’s Ray-Ban Display or a planned Google device simply project a flat screen in front of the wearer’s eye.<\/p>\n
“So it feels like you have a tiny little phone screen stuck to your eye everywhere you look,” Spiegel said.<\/p>\n
Specs, by contrast, map the surrounding world and project three-dimensional digital objects that interact with the real world seen through the lenses.<\/p>\n
Snap is touting a price lower than that of mixed-reality headsets such as Apple’s Vision Pro, which launched at US$3,499 (RM14,220) and whose maker has since halted development for lack of sales.<\/p>\n
“By being able to offer Specs at US$2,195 (RM8,922), we’re able to take this really, really advanced technology and try to put it in as many people’s hands as possible,” Spiegel said.<\/p>\n
The market remains embryonic.<\/p>\n
Meta dominates with its Ray-Ban glasses, more than seven million of which have been sold, but its dedicated division is losing billions of dollars.<\/p>\n
Google has announced connected glasses for the fall, and Samsung has been selling a headset running Google’s Android XR system since October.<\/p>\n
Asked by AFP, Spiegel disclosed no profit margins, production volumes or sales target, saying he measures the success of the Specs by developers’ creativity rather than by financial indicators.<\/p>\n
The launch comes as Snap, which has been in the red since its 2017 stock market debut, cut 16% of its workforce in April, or about 1,000 jobs.<\/p>\n
The group claimed nearly 956 million monthly users for Snapchat in the first quarter.<\/p>\n
The product unveiled Tuesday is the one that activist fund Irenic Capital Management, a Snap shareholder, has demanded be shut down or sold off, denouncing an operation it says has absorbed more than US$3.5bil (RM14.23bil). \u2013 AFP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SAN FRANCISCO: Snap, the parent company of social network Snapchat, on Tuesday launched its Specs augmented reality glasses,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":505877,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[203,61,60,575,80,210,211,212],"class_list":["post-505876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-virtual-reality","tag-gadgets","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-smartphones","tag-technology","tag-virtual-reality","tag-virtualreality","tag-vr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=505876"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505876\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/505877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=505876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=505876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=505876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}