Hacker News Reader

Comment by upwardbound | Hacker News Reader

From the website: 26.3 degree diagonal field of view (stereo). Display brightness up to 2,000 nits. I worked on these but am not allowed to say anything other than citing public sources.

View on HN

It is good to see the brightness improving, but as someone who has played around with some AR devices I think AR is still waiting for the FOV to take a leap forward before these have mainstream appeal. It is just so unnatural when objects disappear from view if you aren't looking directly at them. This isn't as big of a problem in VR when your peripheral vision is just black and therefore your mind can easily learn to ignore it. You still see the world normally with AR and therefore are constantly reminded of the areas in your vision that won't see the augmentations.

Side note, props to Snap for being honest about this in their marketing material. For example, the FOV is noticeably limited in this video[1]. Lots of companies tend to dishonestly crop the image or blow up the augmentation so the FOV looks larger.

[1] - https://twitter.com/Spectacles/status/1395439601590833156

> It is good to see the brightness improving, but as someone who has played around with some AR devices I think AR is still waiting for the FOV to take a leap forward before these have mainstream appeal.

Or just potentially not look ridiculous - or if ridiculous, at least an admirable ridiculousness.

The most brilliant 'AR' concepts I've seen are the mesh of highest form of a mature technology with a dash of new software and most directed intent -- aka Voice Home Assistants, DynamicLand, iBeacons/AirTags, Whole Foods eink displays, Projection Mapping, Google's recent 'be there project' for example.

Those concepts are going to gel together inside someone's mobile platform API (iOS or Android) and become AR without glasses - and be more compelling than wearing a display.

I'm firmly in the camp that displays will be nice, but not must haves for AR.

As a former Glass user, agreed on the need for FOV. While amazing, current AR doesn't feel like "augmented reality", it feels like "tiny transparent phone screen in your eye".

Yeah, that video looks very representative of what I'd expect, from trying a few AR platforms.

The HoloLens and Magic Leap promo material was absurdly misleading in this respect - IRL the viewports feel tiny and the image is dim and low resolution. I'd be hesitant to call them outright lies... if they were anything but obvious, outright lies.

Nreal Light is 1080p with a 52 deg horizontal fov.

> Side note, props to Snap for being honest about this in their marketing material.

That struck me too – I don't think I've ever seen marketing for an AR headset where I came away thinking "that's probably what it really looks like" until this. Not only have they not exaggerated the FOV, they also haven't fudged their compositing to give the impression that the optics are somehow able to add shadows or otherwise obscure the background.

It is because snap has to actually sell the glasses to users. Unlike others who were doing just tech demos.

Has any improvement been made on your guys approach to application processes? My experience with "Yellow LA" was such utter unprofessional, nepotistic, myopic, self aggrandizing bullshit. What is the compelling reason to revisit that for allocating commodity electronics?

That sucks, I'm sorry to hear that. If it helps, the people reviewing these applications are different than the Yellow people, and are really nice. Also there are more of these glasses to go around than there are Yellow spots.

In terms of process, Snap has during the past 12 months made a sustained and well-funded push for racial and gender equality, and that should help a lot to make nepotism impossible in the new process. Here's an important example of Snap's racial equality initiatives: https://www.axios.com/snapchat-cameras-overhaul-racism-6a01b...

Another example, which is not featured in the press but I am very proud of, is that the computer-generated voice we used in the Spectacles V4 out-of-box experience tutorial is a gender-neutral voice. We did this as the start of a journey of attempting to convince the software industry to stop making A.I. assistants be female so often. Having female A.I. assistants perpetuates the gender wage gap by creating the idea that assistant jobs are a women's role. This is a big issue that needs to be tackled and I'm proud to have helped with it in a small way. If anyone reading this works on Siri, Alexa, Cortana, or Google Assistant, please consider asking your management to adopt gender-neutral voice technology.

Here is UNESCO imploring companies to do this: https://en.unesco.org/EQUALS/voice-assistants

"[UNESCO] advises companies and governments to, among other actions: end the practice of making digital assistants female by default; explore the feasibility of developing a neutral machine gender for voice assistants that is neither male nor female"

This seems very unresponsive and myopic. The issue does not appear to have been diversity but work life balance. What does the gender of the Ai voice have to do with reducing the stress at work ?

This reads to me very sincere and good, and I hope the collaborations go well. At the end of the day building an AR hardware product is extremely risky, and takes a very long time, and it's definitely exciting - it's a great contribution to computing.

Snap was also easily my worst job application process ever. Everyone (with one exception) was dismissive and rude and arrogant. I had a interviewer literally laugh in my face when I gave a wrong answer. After the 3-4 hour long series of interviews ended I cried because I felt utterly belittled.

I'm not overly sensitive either, I've been grilled and had tough interviews before at FAANG companies with no problem. They were something else. They also totally ghosted (hah) me when I requested feedback on the interview. Truly horrible experience.

For what it's worth, we had a candidate drop out of our hiring pipeline because they got their dream job at SNAP. The candidate said the interview process was similarly brutal, but hinted that they had secured a large total comp.

The candidate called me several months later asking if we had any openings. He and several of his coworkers were spontaneously laid off, presumably before his stock vesting cliff as well. I remember thinking he seemed awfully dejected on the phone call, a stark contrast to how upbeat he had been earlier.

As with any company, YMMV. That experience stuck with me, though.

“Yellow LA”?

Yellow is Snap's incubator for small startups. I don't think that the bad experience the parent commenter had is typical, and from what I've seen of Yellow it seems very well-run. Perhaps the parent might have misinterpreted things to be different than they are and I'm sorry they had a bad experience.

Explain Yellow LA and Yellow People and references to diversity below ? Confusing/disturbing.

Why do they need to look so rectangular and retro (and not in a good way)? Is it due to the hardware & circuitry inside?

Hope the eventual goal is to make these more appealing. I'd rather not everyone around me know these are what they really are.

Great question. Today's waveguide technology requires flat glass. (This is public information - Karl Guttag's blog covers the topic very well). Product designers have to either make the glasses flat (like Spectacles V4) or make the glasses much bulkier to hide the flat waveguides (like the front of Magic Leap). If added bulk were just a question of size, maybe that wouldn't be such an issue, but for a head-worn product every single gram of mass is important to optimize away.

Thank you

2000 nits is impressive! I have a monitor that has peak nits of 1500 and even at a normal viewing distance it’s almost too bright. 2000 should be enough to work in all but the brightest sunlight.

Can you say anything about potential applications? What do you think will be the killer app for this?

What would be any app for this? It's not immediately apparent why anyone would want this.

Turn by turn navigation that shows you the path to follow in AR that's overlaid on the real road. No more missing your exit, no more not being exactly sure which turn it wants you to take, etc.

Would that appease you?

sounds dangerous to wear AR glasses while driving

lol only on hacker news would this statement be controversial

would be coool while walking. alot of cars already have HUDs like that overlayed onto the windshield

Do you understand why anyone would use existing Snapchat filters? If not, then of course you wouldn’t understand the Spectacles.

Sounds like a lack of imagination.

Construction - Show size/length of objects, show if object is level, highlight location of needed tool.

Navigation - Show arrow on top of uber/lyft, show directions. Show restaurant cleanliness score and rating.

Food safety - Show how long food has been out of fridge

Social - remind you of a persons name

It would make a cool ikea app to guide you to the right part and highlight where it goes

or spot a lost object in your home.

> Social - remind you of a persons name

There was an MIT startup years ago, based on the observation that for some (impaired?) population, when glasses flashed a name, if it was correct, name recall improved, but if it was wrong, there was no negative impact. So low-accuracy recognition was ok.

This page has several videos of potential applications: https://www.spectacles.com/creators

Deep links:

Fitness: https://youtu.be/trd2LT8-G3Y

Travel: https://youtu.be/bzTfMoyBdlM

Learning dance moves: https://storage.googleapis.com/spectacles-v3/NzVlNzU3OWQtY2U...

3D paint: https://storage.googleapis.com/spectacles-v3/NzVlNzU3OWQtY2U...

Interesting how all these example videos are outside, but I can't see that really happening: outside are other people to bump into, surfaces to pay attention to, hazards.

I don't want to learn to dance while standing distracted next to the edge of a cliff.

Good that you can still see the edge of a cliff then, no?

Ideal.

Catching pokemon with those should be fun.

I have hearing aids and know how bad they can be in noisy environments. I wish there were glasses that captioned what it heard to assist in comprehension. Might be useful for those whose hearing loss progressed a lot. The only caution is one must not rely on them too much or your listening skills will degrade.

being able to position X11 (or wayland, I don't care really) windows in space and not have to deal with monitors would sell them for me.

You can do this on some of the VR and AR headsets already. The resolution is just almost but not quite good enough. Its getting there though.

Conversation helper. Imagine you talk to a person. It can give you a list of ice breakers to open up the conversation based on the person's appearance and surroundings.

It can alert you whether the person is not comfortable or very attracted to you. Some people like to miss these subtle cues.

You can combine this AR technology with Deep Learning technology such as Pose Tracker.

https://blog.tensorflow.org/2021/05/next-generation-pose-det...

Although I can only speak for myself and not for Snap, I would discourage these ideas. I think these ideas are a violation of the privacy rights of the person you are looking at. If I were on the Lens review team I would reject these lenses.

Most HN folks interested in hacking on an AR platform will be happy to know there’s a far more capable open source software and hardware platform:

https://docs.projectnorthstar.org/getting-started/faq

100 deg FOV, as many functions / connectivity features as a HoloLens 2, now that’s awesome. You can bypass the virtue signaling, limited app ecosystem, and high price tag and build whatever you’d like.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com