Former Snap Spectacles developer says glasses are ‘clearly bad’

Snap’s latest generation of augmented reality Spectacles was inspired by one of the engineers who helped create it. The glasses, unveiled earlier this week, were described as a “disaster” by Sterling Crispin, Snap’s former design engineer.

“I worked on this for almost a year at Snap, and I have a million negative things to say about the experience and the device, but I think the product speaks for itself and it’s obviously bad,” said Crispin at X in response to New Spectacles Revealed. “I hate these things.”

While Crispin noted that AR and VR devices all face conflicting limitations in things like size, weight, performance, battery life, and manufacturing scale, he criticized the balance of features offered by Snap’s new Spectacles — but didn’t delve into any specific features. Snap. gadget. “This device is a collection of very bad decisions combined, making them even worse,” Crispin said. “Everyone who worked there knew the problems and who they were.”

On the other hand, Snap doesn’t seem to be saying these glasses are ready for mass adoption anytime soon. The new Spectacles are not being sold to the public, and are instead being made available to a limited number of Snapchat AR developers. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel told The Verge that he doesn’t expect AR glasses to become a profitable business until the end of this decade.

But they’re still expensive glasses, and the product is intended as a showcase to get developers excited about AR and its Snap platform. Developers must pay $99 per month to hire them, with a minimum term of at least one year. Meanwhile, people online all over Reddit and X have been teasing the 45-minute battery life and 46-degree field of view (up from 30 minutes and 26.3 degrees on the previous model.)

Holding the glasses, colleague Alex Heath said the hardware has improved on Snap’s fifth-generation Spectacles, but the software “still feels like a good foundation for a standalone device.” He said the field of view is too reduced to feel like a normal pair of glasses and makes “augmented reality less interesting than the real world.”