A pink filter to the world: Spectacles and other smart glasses that increase reality

Seeing the world through pink lenses will soon no longer be a saying. Snap, owner of the Snapchat instant messaging platform, has announced some important changes that take its filters, special effects and stories, born well before those of Instagram, to the next level. The new Spectacles, the latest generation of smart glasses (the fourth in the Snap house) will make it possible, among other things, to apply filters to the real world. Thus a bare lawn is filled with flowers, characters or interactive games appear without leaving the sofa, it becomes possible to visit an outdoor exhibition, look at an ancient monument and see it rebuilt as it once was … and these are just some of the promised possibilities. from the new device. The heart of this generation of glasses is augmented reality, the one that left us speechless a few years ago when, with Pokemon Go, we went hunting for strange virtual animals on the streets of our city, amazed to be able to frame them with the smartphone camera. An experience that seems a century ago if we compare it to what the new Spectacles previewed. And also compared to previous versions of Snap smartglasses which, in fact, were nothing more than glasses equipped with a camera with which to take pictures that were then sent to the smartphone. Here the paradigm is different: glasses interact with the space that surrounds us, and developers must take this into account in the creation of apps that integrate with the movements of the person, which bring augmented reality to eye level and no longer filtered by The glasses are not for sale at the moment, but will be provided free of charge to select developers and creatives around the world to test them and implement new features. But Snap is not the only one to have projected itself into the world of smartglasses: Google, Apple and Facebook have been working on their projects for years. Each has brought its own vision into augmented reality. Apple the exclusivity of the iOS system, Facebook the drive for socialization and interaction, Google the availability of information. Snap, with the leap into augmented reality, wants to make creativity focal. And, so, among the apps available for this launch we find an application that generates three-dimensional poetry in the surrounding environment, another that allows you to paint over reality, and another that makes fantastic animals appear. But, in the future, there will not be room only for creativity: applications for brands have disruptive potential, even in terms of privacy that had proved to be a stopping point for Google Glass. For example, a feature that could arrive on the smartphone app even before the glasses allows, thanks to augmented reality, to scan a person’s outfit, recognize brands, and consequently be directed to the stores where to find those clothes and those objects. A further novelty, renamed Snapshop, is accompanied by the announcement of new remuneration methods for the most popular influencers and content creators on the Snapchat platform, introducing “tips” and “gifts” directly from fans, a bit like Twitter recently did with Tipjar.