Snap Specs Hands-On: Dorky, Fun, and Potentially Too Ambitious

After nearly a decade in the game, Snap is finally ready to deliver its AR glasses to the world. I covered Snap Specs back in June when they were first announced, but at the time I hadn’t gotten the chance to try them out for myself, which naturally left me with a lot of questions about what they’re like to wear—questions I can now (mostly) shed some light on. After a decent amount of time with Specs on my face and my ears, I’ve got both good and bad news for AR glasses as they stand today. Field of vie… If there’s one thing that Specs do not lack, it’s ambition. As I wrote back in June, these aren’t smart glasses in the style of Meta’s AI glasses. While the Meta Ray-Ban Display have a small display in them (a 600 x 600 pixel screen in the bottom-right corner of one lens), Snap Specs are going for something bigger—they’re going for augmented reality. © James Pero / Gizmodo That means the screen isn’t just a conduit for things like 2D notifications and navigation; they’ve got more DNA from mixed reality headsets like Meta’s Quest 3. With Specs on your face, you have access to apps and experiences that actually superimpose digital stuff onto your eyeballs. I got to ogle some of that stuff myself for the first time, and the experience is a bit of a rollercoaster. At first blush, it’s all pretty impressive. I was able to try out experiences like Soccer Skills, which is an AR app that lets you dribble a soccer ball while your Specs give you directions, with augmented arrows that you have to move the ball through to complete the drill. Not going to lie: it was fun. I don’t expect anyone is going to become the next Erling Haaland by wearing Specs, but for light practice purposes, or just entertainment, it was effective. Less fun were apps like Dominoes. It’s not that I have a problem with the game of dominoes itself or how Snap designed the experience, but the act of actually playing together was hindered a bit by probably my biggest gripe with Specs: the field of view (FOV). Specs might have a much improved FOV over the last developer-focused generation—51 degrees over 45 degrees—but it still feels like a tight window compared to a bigger headset like the Quest 3, which has a 110-degree FOV. In non-technical terms, that means you may end up doing a lot of looking around for the digital UI you’re supposed to be looking at. © James Pero / Gizmodo When playing Dominoes with a Snap representative, for example, it took me a bit of time to even find the dominoes I was supposed to be moving around—they were off to the left, out of my sight, and every time I wanted to move a domino, I had to look for it again. The FOV also affects the UI. I had to resize windows a lot, trying to get them to sit in a position that felt easily glanceable. While using apps like Translation, for example, the text I was supposed to be reading while a Snap representative spoke Italian to me liked to drift away from view, making my look at the ground while he spoke. The translation was solid and decently quick, but it won’t get you very far if you look like you’re ignoring someone while they talk to you. If Snap is going to make its Specs feel as useful as a headset, increasing the FOV is the first place I’d start. © James Pero / Gizmodo Overall, the UI is fairly intuitive and feels similar to the Vision Pro’s visionOS, though not nearly as snappy (no pun intended). You can pinch and drag the edge of a window to resize or drag it to the part of the screen where you want it to reside. You can also set it to follow you around, which works, but that also could use some improvement. Walking around with a screen that’s pinned to your motion creates a fairly noticeable blur, which could be a problem if you’re trying to see something on the fly. Still, even with the quirkiness, Snap is onto something. Unlike similar-sized products like the Meta Ray-Ban Display, you can control everything in the Specs UI without an additional piece of hardware—no expensive Neural Band à la Meta. Not quite the ear-crusher I thought Maybe the one area you’d expect me to dunk on Specs the most is actually the area that I find most impressive—the size. Given the fact that these glasses are capable of honest-to-god mixed reality, they’re pretty small. Yes, they’re much bigger than a normal pair of glasses and even the Meta Ray-Ban Display, but they’re a small fraction of the size of headsets like the Quest or the Vision Pro. The pair that I wore (the smaller one) weighs in at 132g, and despite the heft, I found them to feel mostly light on my face, though less so on my ears. Only extended use will tell, but these aren’t nearly as bulky as I’d thought. I wouldn’t want to wear Specs all day, but in short bursts I found them manageable, especially given the experiences they allow. Whether you actually feel comfortable wearing them anywhere is another question entirely. These are very noticeably not regular glasses—they’re chunky—so if you’re going to put them on, you have to just own that. © James Pero / Gizmodo By most people’s estimations, you’re going to look dorky with them on, but compared to a VR headset, the dork factor is reduced significantly. And the fact that Snap has achieved a standalone AR device that’s even anywhere near the size of a regular pair of glasses is impressive. As long as we’re talking about hardware, it’s worth noting that the screen isn’t the most high-res or brightest in the world, but it’s still enough for most activities that you might end up doing with them. I was able to see it both outdoors and indoors, and I appreciated the electrochromic lenses that allow you to automatically adjust the tint to create more contrast. Specs are even more impressive when you compare them to the competition. I’ve tried similar AR glasses from companies like RayNeo and Inmo, and the Specs are easily the most refined of all of those. Will that extra refinement matter for most? Probably not. AR is so new that there is no real frame of reference for most people, so gripes exist in a silo. For now, they’re an exciting template for what could be, and one that only the most extreme of early adopters will bother to experience. At $2,195, this is really a gut punch to your wallet, but that’s the way of gadgets that are trying to carve out a new category. They’re as expensive as they are intriguing and as intriguing as they are easy to dismiss.