Snap Is Now Offering Its AR Spectacles To Students & Educators For $50/Month
Snap is now offering its AR spectacles to students & educators for $49.50/month, a steep discount from the $99/month developer price.
The company behind Snapchat is offering this discounted price to students and faculty in the US, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Austria, and the Netherlands who have a valid education email.
Snap says the move is in response to an "overwhelming amount of interest from students, teachers, and staff from colleges and universities across the world".
As with the developer pricing, the minimum subscription term is 12 months, $594, and you must continue to pay the subscription to keep the hardware. Snap Spectacles are still only available for rental, not outright purchase, and Snap doesn't yet consider it a consumer product.
Snap Spectacles (2024) are fully standalone and wireless AR glasses, though their bulk pushes the limits of what can be described as a true glasses form factor.
They have a field of view of 46 degrees, similar to Xreal glasses and slightly below Hololens 2, and a 36 pixels per degree (PPD) resolution, similar to Apple Vision Pro.
While the onboard battery life of Snap Spectacles is just 45 minutes, the device has a USB-C port on one stem that you can use to power it with an external battery.
Spectacles run Snap OS, which the company describes as a "purpose-built, brand new operating system" for AR.
The glasses feature hand tracking, and the main menu of Snap OS is anchored to one of your hands to be interacted with using the other hand. It also has on-device speech recognition for text input.
Developers build "Lenses" for Snap OS, the company's terms for apps, using Lens Studio 5.0. Snap says developers can easily build Lenses using Spectacles Interaction Kit, and more advanced Lenses can be written using TypeScript and JavaScript. To identify, track, and augment real world objects, SnapML lets developers use custom machine learning models.
Additionally, developers can leverage your smartphone as a 6DoF tracked controller. And with Spectator Mode nearby smartphone users can see what you're seeing in AR.
With HoloLens 2 discontinued last year and Magic Leap focused on education, Spectacles has emerged as a new option for students and educational institutions looking for transparent augmented reality hardware, and we'll keep an eye out for interesting uses of Spectacles by students and educators alike.
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