Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, wearing Snap Specs. I took the photo.
Back in 2016, deep inside a demo room at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco, photographer James Martin took a shot of me with Apple’s brand-new, wireless AirPods in my ears. I had a deliberate Mona Lisa smile on. The AirPods posed for themselves.
The shot went viral, became a meme. The takeaway, generally, was “hell no.” People thought AirPods looked absurd, and I was the face model for that absurdity. I remained aloof about it. After all, what did it matter what it looked like? I wanted to know how they were to use.
It turned out that AirPods were pretty good. And they were pretty successful, too. I bet you own a pair. Or someone else you know does. I bet you’re not laughing at them.
Devices are hard to judge at first sight. Some things seem ridiculous and then become essential. Others seem great and fail. We’re social herd animals. We don’t do things and suddenly we’re all doing them.
I remember the Apple Watch, and all smart watches, suddenly becoming a thing after so many years of them not-quite-becoming-a-thing. I remember suddenly so many friends I knew getting Oculus Quest headsets for their kids during the pandemic.
I think of myself as the Ghost of Devices Yet To Come. That’s my role, test driving the future. I wear the absurdity you probably aren’t yet. But may. Someday, you may.
I was at AWE in Long Beach, flown out by Snap, to be there and learn about Snap’s newest smart glasses announcement. Snap Specs, coming this fall, are $2195. They look big and weird. No one got to demo them, or even put them on. I talked with Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, and took photos of him wearing them in front of me. I wrote about them. And meanwhile, I tried lots and lots of other smart glasses and VR and AR headsets, and neural bands, and motion controllers, studded all over the Long Beach Convention Center.
I have no idea how good Snap’s AR glasses are compared to their previous developer ones. I know the specs on paper. But trying them is all I care about. That’s the determining factor on their interest to me. Before that, nothing else really matters. Price? Size? It’s all relative to what they can do and how well they can do it.
You may disagree, but Snap’s glasses aren’t everyday glasses. They’re meant to be a full augmented reality standalone computer with prescription inserts and a max four hour battery life. And, that price. Smart glasses already exist for less, and are smaller and more all-day wearable. And they’re not full AR. I’m wearing a pair right now, by Meta, which are piping quiet John Williams music to me ears as I write.
After days of hot takes on Snap’s glasses, I just wanted to say I have no real opinions until I try them. Which could be…the fall? I don’t know. I think what they do in dev versions is sort of fascinating already. They work for world-mapped multi person experiences outdoors, the type of stuff no AR glasses really do yet. No smart glasses can handle full 3D world-overlaid AR, really, and headsets like Apple Vision Pro and Quest 3 and Galaxy XR are so big.
Xreal Aura, well, that I’ve tried. Three times, three different places. The glasses, which plug into a phone-like processor puck that has a trackpad and can act like a passthrough dock for connected iPhones or Steam Deck or laptops or Nintendo Switch 2, runs a full suite of Android apps. It has hand tracking. It feels like a tiny VR headset in glasses form. Like if VR came in the form of earbuds for your eyes. Smaller field of view (70 degrees), but open up 3D Google Maps and you’re in a little Vision Pro like world that folds into a tiny case…
Xreal Aura and Snap Specs are both coming out this year, part of a whole new evolutionary branching pathway of where things known as VR and AR headsets and glasses are heading. And there are more oddities elsewhere. Apple, whose WWDC conference I went to the week before, had no new hardware. But Siri’s improvements in all their devices, especially Vision Pro, feels like the tendrils of a new framework for future devices. Wearable ones, especially. Glasses, in particular.
The Vision Pro is getting all sorts of little upgrades, from graphics bumps for mixed reality to working better with extended Mac apps, to starting to see the world with Siri AI in-headset, a bit like Google’s Android XR can do with Gemini.
Apple will have glasses, and Google will have glasses. And Snap will have glasses. And Samsung will have glasses. And Qualcomm just announced a new XR chip, did I mention, that vastly improves how VR and AR devices can handle AI, and that new Snapdragon Reality Elite chip is on Xreal Aura, and more to come…
And as I played with Wearable Devices’ Mudra Pro research neural band, which has EMG sensors like Meta’s neural band plus optical heart rate, with plans for an EDA sensor next, customizing and recognizing gestures with a new coding app and plans to explore how EMG could be a next-gen health sensor as well as brain-computer interface, I thought…the shape of the things we’re using is changing. It will change.
As I said, I’m just the ghost of the future devices, haunting a bit with the possibilities. All these companies could fail or succeed. And AI, that hulking overbloated overhyped behemoth that threatens to unravel and transform everything, well, even in its messy and resource-heavy and unsustainable current form, there are ways it could shrink and transform and grow pseudopods and change again and again, take forms that are nothing like now. I played with offline on-device visual assistance on TCL RayNeo X3 Pro glasses using Qualcomm’s AR1 Gen 1 chips, a demo of how some of the AI that now seems like it needs to be cloud-based may not be down the road.
All of my writing, in a sense, is about making snap judgements at some point or another. Thinking fast from demos. See the possibilities, don’t fall for the magic trick, land a way to communicate to you, the person out there who can’t see it.
But when it comes to this ever-changing future of devices, snap judgements need proper time to form, too.
Side note: my panel at AWE on How to Design Memorable Experiences with Storytelling, with Leah Rubin-Cadrain and Eve Weston, was a chat about thinking about these futures. Stuff I’m already trying to write towards. Create towards. Talking to Lucas Rizzotto and Pete Cybriwsky at Tribeca Film during a Q&A after his newest performance of Escape the Internet: Part One was another piece.
Side note 2: I went up to LA at 11pm the night I arrived at AWE to see some friends I met in February perform in a mixed reality play at the LA Fringe at a theater run by another friend. I loved the journey. Theater in new forms matters to me a great deal now. (I saw the Ferryman Collective’s latest work in Quests on the AWE floor, too). I need to make these pilgrimages and see what there is to see. I’ve got an idea of my own that’s waiting to germinate. Several, in fact.
Side note 3: I’m close to finishing Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon. A thing I may never read again, but glad for the 30-year-delayed journey. It’s a hallucinogenic dirge for America’s 250th.
Things I’ve written the last two weeks:
It’s been a busy month. Time for some vacation. And more to come.