Smart glasses are being touted as the way of the future, but at least one person who’s worked on such projects isn’t quite so sure.
A former design engineer at Snap has lambasted the company’s latest augmented-reality Spectacles, the Verge reported on Friday. Sterling Crispin took to X to voice his displeasure with the fifth-generation smart glasses, which were revealed earlier this week but are not yet available to the public.
“I worked on these for about 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 is obviously bad,” Crispin wrote. “I don’t want to get into the specifics because I might inadvertently break an NDA, and would probably hurt some people’s feelings who worked on it, but it’s really a disaster.”
In a statement shared with Robb Report, a spokesperson for Snap said, “This individual departed Snap before key hardware and software design decisions for this version of Spectacles had been made.”
The next-gen Spectacles iterate on the previous versions in a few ways, but the features aren’t much to write home about. The device has just 45 minutes of battery life and 46 degrees in the field of view, the Verge noted. (That’s compared with 30 minutes and 26.3 degrees for the prior model.) And while consumers can’t yet shell out for the new and improved Spectacles, they’re being offered to Snap’s AR developers for $99 a month, with a one-year minimum.
Crispin said these limitations are apparent with all AR and virtual-reality products, which have to contend with issues such as size, performance, and scale of production, the Verge wrote. Even still, he claims that Snap’s Spectacles are a pretty terrible version of such technology.
“This device is a set of very bad decisions that compounded, making them even worse,” Crispin said, according to the outlet. “Everyone working on it knew the problems and who was making them.”
Snap seems to have enough confidence in the new model to have revealed it to the public, however. But Evan Spiegel, the CEO of the company, doesn’t think AR glasses will be a huge part of Snap’s business until the end of the 2020s. Compare that with another tech company, Meta, which just entered a long-term partnership with EssilorLuxottica to make smart glasses into the next decade. (The two have already teamed up on Ray-Ban’s Meta glasses.) If it wants to compete with that, Snap might have to take another look at its Spectacles.
Authors
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Tori Latham
Tori Latham is a digital staff writer at Robb Report. She was previously a copy editor at The Atlantic, and has written for publications including The Cut and The Hollywood Reporter. When not…
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