Former Snap Spectacles developer says glasses are ‘obviously bad’

Snap’s latest generation of augmented reality glasses has been roundly criticized by one of the engineers who helped create them. Sterling Crispin, a former design engineer at Snap, called the glasses, which were unveiled earlier this week, a “disaster.”

“I’ve been working on these products 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 it’s clearly bad.” Crispin said on X In response to the unveiling of the new Spectacles, he said, “I hate these things.”

While Crispin noted that AR and VR devices all face conflicting limitations around things like size, weight, performance, battery life, and production scale, he criticized the balance of features offered by Snap’s new Spectacles — but didn’t examine any specific elements of the gadget. “This device is a collection of very bad decisions compounded, making it worse,” Crispin said. “Everyone who worked on it knew the problems and who was causing them.”

For its part, Snap doesn’t seem to be saying that these glasses are ready for mass adoption by any means. The new glasses won’t be sold to the public, but are instead being made available to a limited number of Snapchat AR developers. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel told The Edge Augmented reality glasses are not expected to become a meaningful business until the end of this decade.

But they’re still expensive glasses, and the product is meant to showcase its products and excite developers about augmented reality and its Snap platform. Developers will have to pay $99 a month to rent them, with a minimum term of one year. Meanwhile, People online via Reddit and X was making fun of him. Thanks to a limited battery life of 45 minutes and a 46-degree field of view (compared to 30 minutes and 26.3 degrees on the previous model).

In his hands-on experience with the glasses, my colleague Alex Heath said the hardware had improved for the fifth generation of Snap glasses, but the software “still felt very basic for a standalone device.” He said the field of view was much smaller than the feel of regular glasses and made “AR significantly less engaging than the real world.”