Week in Review - Hands-on with Snapchat's vision of the future

Saturday, December 11, 2021 • By Lucas Matney

Hello friends, and welcome back to Week in Review!

Last week, we took a look at the crypto passions of Jack Dorsey. This week, we’re looking at the dark horse of the augmented reality race.

If someone forwarded you this message, you can get this in your inbox from the newsletter page, and follow my tweets @lucasmtny.

the big thing

Every tech giant seems to be betting on augmented reality as an essential element of the future of computing. The companies have been broadcasting this shift while racing to build hardware as quickly as possible, allowing consumers to see Big Tech’s vision of the future in slow motion.

While Facebook/Meta has been building this future in public with Oculus, Apple has been doing so in the background with leaked details illuminating their shifting timelines and plans. While the trillionaire enterprises have been bulking up talent and readying a showdown, Snap — a much smaller company — has been making its own case for AR supremacy building up an audience of users who are warming up to the idea of Snapchat dropping its own digital layer onto the reality we see with our eyes.

This week, I got the opportunity to play around with Snap’s unreleased vision of the future — the company’s augmented reality Spectacles. The device I tried is built exclusively for developers creating on the Snapchat platform and while there are plenty of these headsets out in the wild already, Snap hasn’t indicated any plans to release an AR device for consumers anytime soon.

The glasses are much smaller than a HoloLens of Magic Leap headset, but the capabilities are reined in as well. The avant-garde sunglasses design hides a pair of transparent waveguide displays which pipe in a digital overlay of the world which you can see through the lenses. The company had its Lens Fest event for AR filter creators this week and my demo was in that context so I got to test out a few AR Spectacles-specific lenses which ranged from seeing one developer’s impression of an augmented reality restaurant menu to running away from cartoon zombies.

The device was largely standard fare, I’ve tried out dozens of augmented reality devices over the years and there wasn’t anything too out of the ordinary on display with the Spectacles, which are able to achieve their diminutive size in this developer iteration partially by only having a half-hour battery life which is obviously quite short. It’s clear the device is in its earliest stages with the team focusing largely on nailing the experience of making it easy for mobile developers to ship Snapchat experiences in AR. Snap’s vision seems to be providing bite-sized experiences similar to what has worked for the company on mobile, but ultimately Snap seems to be forecasting a developer-led platform. We haven’t seen much in the way of first-party AR experiences from any of the tech giants yet with most focused on releasing AR development tools.

Snap is very notably the first big company to experiment publicly with a lightweight AR glasses prototype, but both Meta and Apple have clear advantages in this world still.

Apple is already a hardware kingpin with a device and software ecosystem that could keep consumers inside the “walled garden” of services. Meanwhile, Meta has been experimenting in public for more than 6 years with iteration after iteration of VR hardware which run on software with wide design applicability to augmented reality. For now, Snap’s biggest opportunity is its youthful, engaged user base and network of creators already on board. This week, Snap showcased its plan to make the most of the latter.

Critically, this technology is likely still years away from mainstream usage and as we’ve seen time and time again, an awful lot can change in a few years.

Don’t sleep on your rivals. Track them 24/7.

other things

Here are a few stories this week I think you should take a closer look at:

Meta launches its metaverse platform
When Oculus revealed the Horizon social app back in 2019, there wasn’t a ton riding on the platform which was pretty much just another VR social release for the company. In 2021, that isn’t the case anymore. Facebook is Meta — a metaverse company — and there’s a lot to lose if Horizon Worlds sucks. The platform has been in closed beta for months but just opened up to users in the US and Europe this week.

Facebook calling itself a “metaverse company” hasn’t meant much thus far given they’re lack of available “metaverse” platforms, but Horizon Worlds marks the start of something ambitious. While Facebook has historically killed off its VR social products after a year or two of trying to build up an audience, the stakes are a little higher here and Meta is probably going to have to make this one work one way or another.

SEC investigating Tesla (again)
After a whistleblower revealed undisclosed issues with Tesla’s solar panel products, the SEC has opened a probe into the company and its subsidiary SolarCity. The SEC has been a near-constant thorn in Tesla’s side, but it’s hard to see many ill effects to the company’s business which is continuing to maintain its $1 trillion market cap.

Twitter acquires nascent Slack competitor
This week, Twitter shared that it had acquired Quill, a startup that was aiming to compete with Slack on the business messaging front. It seems the company never made it too far in that quest, but Twitter will be bringing on the team to tackle revamping DMs though they will also be shutting down the core Quill app. Twitter has found itself venturing into uncharted territory with its acquisitions in recent months as the company looks to expand its platform (and market opportunity).

Image Credits: Meta

added things

Some of my favorite reads from our newly renamed TechCrunch+ subscription service this week:

Silicon Valley’s share of US VC funding falls
“…In recent years, Bay Area startups have accounted for a smaller percentage of U.S. VC investment, according to “Beyond Silicon Valley,” a new report co-produced by venture firm Revolution and PitchBook. So far in 2021, only about 27% of U.S. VC dollars have gone to Bay Area startups. It’s been more than 10 years since that percentage fell below 30%, the study said, despite the fact that the country is on track to see record amounts of venture funding overall this year…”

3 disruptive trends that will shape marketing
“…No longer armed with user-level data or access to robust platform attribution, marketers will have to roll up their sleeves and do it themselves. Top performers will embrace the roots of marketing measurement and media mix modeling, which involves comparing sales with marketing spend and using regression analysis to draw correlations and assign weightings to your marketing channels…“

How to acquire customer research that shapes strategy
“…You want to interview the right customers and ask questions such as, ‘what are you ultimately trying to achieve? ‘What’s the first thing you’ll do’ or ‘Have you tried to fix this problem yourself, and if so, which products have you cobbled together?’ There’s certainly a science to the questions to ask, but the emphasis needs to be on what they are trying to accomplish. Take note, this can be a lengthy process because you have to really dig into interviews, but the rewards are totally worth it…”