History
In December 2014 Snap Inc., then Snapchat Inc., acquired Vergence Labs [3] the developers of the Epiphany Eyewear smartglasses. [4] Vergence Labs was founded by entrepreneur Erick Miller in 2011 before Google Glass was announced. Miller worked on the idea as a graduate student at UCLA and poured his life savings into building the product. [5] Snapchat was impressed with the Epiphany Eyewear product and the great team assembled by Miller, and acquired Vergence to develop a similar eyewear product. [6] [3]
Epiphany Eyewear which recorded wide-angle point-of-view videos, had been positioned as Vergence's first step toward eventually building full featured augmented reality glasses which, according to Miller, would someday "give people what would previously be called superpowers". [6] However, due to Vergence's small engineering team (consisting of founder ceo Erick Miller, co-founder Jon Rodriguez, software engineer Peter Brook, and designer / mechanical engineer David Meisenholder), the company had to scale back its ambitions in order to ship its simpler first product, Epiphany Eyewear, which the team was able to successfully ship despite their extremely limited funding and team size. [3] The successful development and launch of their product led to the company being noticed by Snapchat, which quietly acquired them, bringing them in-house to develop a similar but much more refined eyewear product for Snapchat.
In October 2015, a leaked online video showed an early version of the new glasses, dubbed "Spectacles." [7] on mid 2016, news outlets reported that Snapchat was hiring engineers from Microsoft, Nokia and Qualcomm. Reporters speculated that the hires were to build the new glasses. [8] [9] [10]
The new product was unveiled on September 24, 2016, and [11] released on November 10, 2016. [12] The glasses were sold through Snapbot, a proprietary vending machine for the smartglasses, which was located near Snap's headquarters in Venice, Los Angeles. [12]
In May 2017, a Snapchat patent became public which included an illustration of a hypothetical future version of Spectacles with augmented reality capabilities. [13]
In late 2017, Snapchat wrote off $40m worth of unsold Spectacles inventory and unused parts. As of May 2018, the company sold 220,000 pairs, which was less than initially expected. [14] In April 2018, the company launched Spectacles 2.0, which included additional colors, lighter frames, the option of mirrored lenses, and the removal of the bright yellow ring around the camera window. [14]
In June 2018, Snap released an update for Spectacles allowing users to export videos from the glasses in square or widescreen format. [15]
In November 2018, it was reported that the company would release a new version of Spectacles by year end 2018 that included two cameras. [16] The Snap Spectacles 3, which did feature two HD cameras on-device, were ultimately announced in August 2019. [17]
In May 2021, Snap announced its first AR-based product called Spectacles 4. [18] The AR effects are officially referred to as Lenses and feature dual 3D waveguide display with a 26.3-degree diagonal field of view. [19] [20] It runs on the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR1 chip and has 2 RGB cameras, 4 microphones, and 2 stereo speakers. [21] Snap claimed to have more than 250,000 Lens creators who created 2.5 million Lenses altogether. [22] AR experiences available on the glasses as of December 2021 included "a zombie chase, a pong game, Solar System projection, and an interactive art piece." Additionally, according to The Verge, "Another new software update brings Connected Lenses to Spectacles, letting multiple pairs interact with the same Lens when sharing a Wi-Fi network." [22] [23]
On September 17th, 2024, the fifth generation Spectacles AR glasses were unveiled by Snap Inc. CEO Evan Spiegel at the company's Snap Partner Summit event. This version of Spectacles was notable for being fully standalone (i.e. not requiring a phone tether or physical cable connection), for debuting see-through waveguide displays, and for its advanced environment and hand tracking capabilities. The release also marked the introduction of Snap OS, a dedicated operating system for Spectacles. This version weighs 226 grams.
