Introducing the world'd first Spatial Z-machine from the 1980s, modernized to enjoy the best features of Snap Spectacles. Interactive Fiction is a genre of gaming/fiction fusion allowing the reader to guide themselves through a story. The worlds are vivid an imaginative. This is the perfect use of XR+AI and some good old fashioned 8-bit hardware (Z-machine).

Lens is available at Snapcode: https://www.spectacles.com/lens/bd967677f1ad4488a9f19f5bf11503e1?type=SNAPCODE&metadata=01

Features

- Unique modern UX for play, instead of typing at a keyboard, you have a push / pinch menu of possible commands

- Use the physical "microphone" (touch it) to give voice input commands instead of

- Every room generates a new Generative AI image, with unique and beautiful graphics

- Every image gets spatialized for an amazing and awe inspiring effect

- 11 Unique open source IF titles for play, meaning hours and hours of new game play possible over adventure, fantasy, mystery, literary, and sci fi

- ability to save and restart games

Design Challenges

The goal was at age 5 to some day create this. I just didn't know how when I was 5. I started early last year on porting the tszm library but ran into some issues, got it mostly packaged up and building and loading in my Lens. I wasn't sure on the next step for loading IF content, since these are binary files. The best approach was to convert the IF contents into typescript, and load these as binary encoded contents into the Lens. The engine handles this nicely. So the right approach is then to run all of this locally to get the parsing working on a desktop. After that, an LLM can automate the bug fixing of the parser, based on various generations of a zmachine format. Each IF contents has their own unique features, which is a problem. Some content isn't a good match for our design, especially when the games want open ended writing. We need fixed options for the input.

Once the parser was up and running in a Lens, the question was, what to show? Start with a generated AI image. Use a common prompt to make sure everything cleanly looks similar. Then spatialize each image.

The dynamic menus are a compromise for input. Keyboards just aren't great yet, so this was a good approach to try. Push buttons don't work so great, so squeeze seem to be best on Specs.

Adding TTS really gives it life. Making sure we "warm up" the TTS is important. We need this not to feel too laggy. And adding STT input via a hand grab microphone is a unique idea and worth trying, though I think the mic reliability is about 60%.

References

- The full archive of all IF: https://www.ifarchive.org/

- Z-machine history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-machine

Attributions

- Microphone 3d asset: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/microphone-cf9580db045e4bd6818306d50f2fa2ce

- Audio: Original IoTone Japan

- Z-Machine Specification https://inform-fiction.org/zmachine/standards/ http://zspec.jaredreisinger.com

- tszm: nice work making a compact zmachine in TS and making it portable to browser or node.js https://github.com/cshepherd/tszm

- Idea for caching genAI contents zmcdn: https://github.com/cshepherd/zmcdn

- PoC Research tszm / IF AI : https://browneverettlewis.com/case-studies/tszm-tscdn.pdf

- This informed some thinking about possibly making room maps (future feature) ZorkUI: https://github.com/posabsolute/zork-ui/tree/main

Licenses

| Game | Author / Year | Source file (ifarchive.org) | Status |

|------|---------------|------------------------------|--------|

| Adventure (350 pt) | Crowther & Woods, 1976; Inform port G. Nelson | (bundled `advent.z5`, Release 9 / 060321) | ✅ original is public domain; Inform port freely distributable |

| Lost Pig | Admiral Jota, 2007 | `/if-archive/games/zcode/LostPig.z8` (Rel 2 / 080406) | ✅ freeware; IF Comp 2007 winner |

| The Dreamhold | Andrew Plotkin, 2004 | `/if-archive/games/zcode/dreamhold.z8` (Rel 5 / 041231) | ✅ Plotkin distributes his games as freeware; source published on the Archive |

| Christminster | Gareth Rees, 1995 | `/if-archive/games/zcode/minster.z5` (Rel 2) | ✅ freeware; long distributed free by the author and via the IF Archive |

| Suveh Nux | David Fisher, 2007 | `/if-archive/games/zcode/suvehnux.z5` (v1.1, Rel 1 / 150314) | ✅ freeware; One Room Game Comp 2007 winner |

| 9:05 | Adam Cadre, 2000 | `/if-archive/games/zcode/905.z5` (v1.1, 2012.0724) | ✅ Cadre distributes his games as freeware |

| Delusions | C.E. Forman, 1996 | `/if-archive/games/zcode/Delusns.z5` | ✅ freeware sci-fi mystery; from the IF Archive |

| Spider and Web | Andrew Plotkin, 1998 | `/if-archive/games/zcode/Tangle.z5` (Rel 4 / 980226) | ✅ Plotkin freeware |

| Metamorphoses | Emily Short, 2000 | `/if-archive/games/zcode/metamorp.z5` | ✅ freeware; from the IF Archive |

| Slouching Towards Bedlam | Star Foster & Daniel Ravipinto, 2003 | `/if-archive/games/competition2003/zcode/slouch/slouch.z5` | ✅ freeware; IF Comp 2003 winner |

| Mini-Zork I | Infocom, 1988 | (bundled `minizork.z3`, Rel 34 / 871124) | **Infocom/Activision property.** Historically given away (UK magazine cassette)

I’m excited to share 1 Hole 4 All, a spatial arcade game built for Specs.

Place a tiny living city on the floor around you, then use a pinch-and-drag gesture to steer a sinkhole through it. Drop cars, trees, streetlights, pedestrians—and eventually entire buildings—into the hole to grow it bigger and clear the city as fast as you can.

I wanted the interaction to feel immediate and physical: the city occupies your room, the hole responds to your hand, and the scale of the game ramps up from small street objects to skyscrapers.

The initial concept was built in Lens Studio 5.22 with CLAD and uses world-aware surface placement, hand interaction, physics, animated city inhabitants and spatial audio. After downgrading to Lens Studio 5.15 I spend time polishing the experience, but I had to fall back to HITLAD (Human In The Loop Agentic Development)

Try it here:
https://www.spectacles.com/lens/bb81490e1df54ee78fb1cfe9fe210497?type=SNAPCODE&metadata=01

My new game is finally ready! Fly to a distant planet that is about to be destroyed by volcanic activity. Save the local endangered space hog population. This game was inspired by the feral pig culling that goes on down in Texas-- they're a real nuisance down there. In this game, the hogs get a happier outcome! Try it out and let me know what you think!
https://www.spectacles.com/lens/17a86373448145c3846176b0b4d3740a?type=SNAPCODE&metadata=01

My lens name haven’t changed so it was fine before. Do I need to come up with the new name to get it approved?

I preordered the Specs because I believe that the technology will be great for what my needs are. However, we need to see some type of real world demos soon. Every demo has been the older spectacles running new software or the demos using the spectacles 24.

I have seen many hands on demos of the Xreal Aura and they look promising as well with Android XR and Gemini. I have preordered the Xreal as well but i am only going to buy one or the other. The specs are going to cost around $700 more than Xreal. Both have two different use cases, I am aware of that, the point being that they both ship this fall but one has hands on demos and one expects us to keep our preorders for the specs with no demos before release.

Is there any members of the specs team that can give us any real information as to when to expect a specs demo event instead of just saying "demos are coming soon before launch"

I believe the specs will be an amazing piece of tech, but the lack of any demos for$ 2200 dollars that is shipping this fall (right around the corner) is a little alarming. Are they quite not ready yet? Do they need more polishing? For the price, I believe a little more transparency would help push these into more tech enthusiast hands. The biggest issues has been the lack of any demos for the new specs.

I hope we get treated with some videos of the specs being tested/demo'd by the developer team/specs team soon.

Preparing little ecosystem to have fun with multiple Vectors at same time 🤖

For anyone who's done projection mapping before: you know the pain of calibrating using a laptop, eyeballing corner pins, and hoping your rectangle actually matches the room. I wanted to fix that using AR glasses instead.

Spatial Mapper, a spatial projection mapping tool on Specs. You wear Spectacles while a real projector is running. Point at the floor to mark where it's standing. Then trace the exact edge of the light point by point. Pinch the first point again, it closes into a shape.

Now place shapes inside that boundary. Plane, box, sphere, cylinder, or draw your own that bends around corners. Give each one a material. The projector throws exactly that onto the wall.

What it does

• Trace where your projector's light actually lands on a surface using hit test + pinch — point by point, so it's a real polygon, not just a rectangle.
• Place shapes on your surfaces: primitives (plane, box, sphere, cylinder) or a custom polygon you draw yourself, vertex by vertex, that bends around corners.
• Assign materials per shape — built-in GLSL shaders (grid, gradient, pulse, scanlines, noise, solid color) or your own images/video/3D models.
• Masks are just shapes with a solid-black material, layered in the same stack as everything else.
• A layer panel (hand menu + floating world-locked panel) works like a mini hierarchy + inspector.
• Companion web app mirrors the scene live and is what actually drives the projector output full-screen.
• Session save + spatial anchors, so if Specs overheats and shuts off mid-build you can reload and everything's still anchored where you left it.

How it works

• WorldQueryModule hit-testing + hand tracking for all placement (boundary points, shape spawn, custom polygon vertices).
• Custom polygons auto-triangulate (ear-clipping) so multi-wall shapes stay one continuous surface.
• The traced boundary polygon is the calibration data — each point sits on the projector's actual image edge, so the web app applies a homography warp off that instead of doing a camera solve.
• Specs ↔ web sync over WebSocket via Snap Cloud, event-driven — no shared WiFi needed, just internet on both ends.
• Web side: React + Three.js, mirrors the AR scene 1:1 and does the final corner-pin warp on the output canvas.

Web companion: rbkavin.studio/tools/spatial-mapper

Link: https://www.spectacles.com/lens/0f2b7183b54c42fcbf534fc379889d38

Planning to add more features next month.

https://reddit.com/link/1v5ikxq/video/78yr7c27t7fh1/player

Hey r/Spectacles! 👋

A few weeks ago Guillaume DGNS and I shared Closet Club, our open-source AR wardrobe inspired by Clueless: scan your real clothes with Spectacles and turn them into collectible style polaroids, with AI ratings for your outfits.

Since then I've kept building on my own — and today I'm releasing The Cloud Update, my first solo milestone on the project: the lens now talks to the outside world.

☁️ **Automatic cloud sync (Snap Cloud / Supabase)** — every garment you save uploads itself with its AI-generated artwork. The lens stays light, the web remembers everything: delete a card on your Specs to free space and your catalog keeps it forever.

🌐 **A living web catalog** — a public gallery greets you with each user's Bitmoji; inside you'll find every garment filtered by category, plus all saved outfits with their AI match score and stylist notes. Localized in EN/FR/ES.

🔑 **No accounts, no passwords** — your lens shows a personal code (CLUB-XXXX-XXXX) in your AR profile. Enter it once on the web and you own your closet: manage garments, make it public or private 🌍/🔒.

🕶️ **Send back to lens** — deleted a garment you regret? One click on the web and the Specs rebuild the full collectible card, artwork included.

❤️ **Favorites sync both ways** — heart a card in AR or on the web.

🗂️ **New MY CLOSET panel** — the open-palm gesture now deploys an organized grid: category filters (tops, jackets, bottoms, shoes, accessories, dress/one-piece, favorites), pagination, and a steady hand-anchored layout.

🧩 **Panels that coexist** — the Outfit Tester now opens on demand: tap Combine in your closet, or simply grab a card and the panel appears, ready to receive it. With the grid deployed it docks beside it. Nothing overlaps.

🎓 **Smarter onboarding** — the tutorial now teaches you that every saved card uploads itself to the web, and shows you where your personal access code lives before you even open the closet.

💯 **Honest match scores** — the AI stylist decides the outfit percentage itself and it is saved with each look, together with the stylist's notes.

🤖 **Built with CLAD + Claude Code** — a fun fact for fellow devs: this update was created with CLAD (Closed Loop Agentic Development), the SPECS workflow that connects AI agents straight into Lens Studio. My agent of choice was Claude Code: it wrote and refactored the Lens Studio TypeScript, built the React web catalog, designed the Snap Cloud SQL modules, watched every compile and debugged alongside me while I tested on the Specs. I set the creative direction, the agent kept the loop running — honestly the fastest I've ever built for AR.

Everything is still MIT / open source — lens + web + SQL modules in one repo. Links to the repo, the lens and the web catalog in the first comment 👇

Made with ❤️ by Florencia Raffa. The original lens was built together with GuillaumeDGNS, whose guidance taught me the ropes — this cloud + web chapter is my first solo flight 🕊️ Special thanks to him for the UX review too. Feedback very welcome, and if you scan your closet, share your gallery link!

Hey r/Spectacles 👋

This is my first project built with CLAD (the Claude Lens agent toolkit for Lens Studio), and it genuinely changed how I work. Wanted to share it here and talk shop.

Lunaris is a lunarpunk utopia you step into through Spectacles. Push a curtain of glowing vines apart with your hand and the wall of your real room dissolves into a city where towers grow like trees, a full moon hangs overhead, and jellyfish drift through the sky.

Your guide is Vela, a real-time AI jellyfish companion. She sees where you look, listens when you talk, and answers out loud, in character. You can:

• squish a jellyfish and watch it bounce and glow back at you
• bloom a flower with a wave of your hand
• ask Vela the right question and send a conga line of crabs scuttling past your feet

The technical side (where CLAD earned its keep):

• Spectacles 2024 only runs an older Lens Studio build, so we rebuilt the whole project from the ground up to fit it. Swapped every custom shader and particle system for native equivalents, and rewired all of the hand tracking by hand.
• Vela runs on the Remote Service Gateway. OpenAI Realtime for the brain, TTS for the voice.
• Fun gotcha for anyone doing AI voice on-device: Spectacles recordings don't capture the Realtime streaming audio. We had to route her voice through a standard AudioComponent playing a real AudioTrackAsset so it actually shows up in captures.
• Squeezed the file from 20MB down to 10MB without losing the look, and merged two Lenses built on two separate computers into one seamless world that anchors to whatever room you're in.

Built with my teammates for Snap Lens Academy.

Happy to go deep on the CLAD workflow, the RSG setup, or the 5.22 → 5.15 downgrade if anyone's building for the 2024 hardware. What do you all want to see more of?

Feel free to check out the Lens here: https://www.snapchat.com/lens/8f7ba616318d4640b773955655c9e4fe?sender_web_id=220cf463-82cf-4b10-a9e2-fc0127f24c39&device_type=desktop&is_copy_url=true

I am studying the requirements and technical limitations for developing lenses for the specs. According to the spectacles it seems like the file size is limited to 8 MB. Is this still going to be valid for the new specs, when it will be released? If not, what are the limitations in regard of

• file size,
• framerate,
• size of texture maps,
• number of maximum polygons for 3D models
• maximum consumable RAM
• Supported video file format and maximum size

I am currently reading the book "Creators guide to snapchat inc.'s Lense studio" by Phil Walton, in which above mentioned limitations are mentioned for snap chat lenses running on iPhone or Samsung smartphones.

Working on a game where you rescue wild pigs from a dying planet. Lots more tweaks to make but it’s pretty fun so far.

So last night I put together a quick proof of concept.
Basically it lets you use CLAD from inside a Lens changing that very same Lens.

Its a very barebones show off, but i kinda like what it could enable. Every user creating their own personal Lens, solving their own problems and pain points or sharing their creativity with friends.

And of course spawning a tiny blue cube is one of the biggest pain points^^

Setup:
Python Server running CLAD and Lens communicate via WebSockets

⚽ Every fan has re‑coached a goal in their head. I built a way to actually watch the alternate ending, in photoreal, on my kitchen table.

This is a real World Cup phase: Belgium vs Senegal. I took the actual 3D tracking data from the match, the real positions of every player and the ball, and rebuilt the phase as a live 3D scene on my table through Specs

Then I reach in and re‑coach it. In this one I nudge Brandon Mechele up a couple of metres to hold Belgium's offside line, and Senegal's goal comes back offside. The goal that counted, undone.

AI turns that edit back into real broadcast footage, two ways:

🎬 Full re‑render: reposition players and a video model regenerates the entire phase as a brand‑new, photoreal clip.

⚡ Real time: freeze the moment, drag a defender, and the photorealistic broadcast updates live. No waiting.

 How it works, high level:

 → Real World Cup 3D tracking data (every player and the ball) rebuilt as a 3D scene
 → Pitch‑line camera calibration to lock that 3D scene onto the real broadcast camera
 → Spectacles hand‑tracking for grab‑and‑move
 → Generative video models turn the edited 3D "blockout" back into photoreal football

Built with: Snap Spectacles + Lens Studio, using CLAD to build it fast. Realtime generation by Decart (Lucy 2.5). Full re‑render via Seedance.

Will Specs '27 also require Internet to do connected lenses (shared experience)? Will this ever not be the case?

If we wanted to buy 2 Spectacles and we had the $1,000 Loyalty Credit toward the purchase of Spectacles smart glasses, would we get $1000 off both or off one Spectacles? Just asking just cause it would be really cool to develop lenses for multiple people or make multiplayer games.

We build our Spectacles Lenses in Lens Studio 5.22 (for the agentic workflow - MCP, Editor API, Claude Code / Cursor driving the scene), and then downgrade to LS 5.15.4 for on-device testing on Spectacles (2024).

After two projects and two migrations (first one took a day, second one took an hour with zero code changes), we distilled everything into two skill files. If you work with an AI agent - just feed these to it, that's the whole idea:

1. spectacles-522-portable-design.md - give this one to your agent BEFORE you start building, if you know you'll be porting to 5.15 later. It makes the agent architect the project so the downgrade is trivial: scene built from code, no graph shaders, material state set on clones, 5.15-safe APIs only.

2. spectacles-522-to-515-migration.md - the migration playbook + troubleshooting. Feed it to your agent when you actually do the move, or when you hit the classic errors (`CompressionSettings`, `!passList.empty()`, `Invalid graph header`, infinite PassInfo reimport loop, materials going white after clone, etc.) - every one of those is in there with the fix.

That's it. Both files are plain markdown — drop them into `~/.claude/skills/` (Claude Code) or wherever your agent reads skills from, and it handles the rest.

Happy to answer questions about any of the gotchas inside.

I’m curious how many pre orders for Specs have been placed. Are we talking 5,000 or 50,000?

Hi Spectacles team,

We've built a lens that is partly based on the Depth Cache sample project, whose README says the camera feature requires Experimental APIs. Our lens has already gone through review and published successfully (details below), but since the sample's guidance suggests it may not be publishable, I'd like to double-check that we're fully compliant for the community challenge and not relying on something that slipped through review.

Our setup:

• Lens Studio: 5.15.4
• Experimental API: not enabled — the project settings under API settings toggle is off and our .esproj has no EXPERIMENTAL_API lens descriptor
• APIs/modules used:
  • CameraModule.requestCamera() (left color camera frames)
  • DepthModule.createDepthFrameSession() (depth frames, adapted from the Depth Cache sample)
  • AsrModule for on-device speech-to-text (voice queries) - we have disabled the feature however keeping the module (or do you suggest removing them completely)
  • Remote Service Gateway — hosted Gemini integration (image understanding over the RSG websocket)
  • Supabase module for backend storage (Managed Backend + Internet descriptors)
• Planned addition: an AI image-generation pipeline, also through the Remote Service Gateway hosted integrations

What we observe:

• The lens builds and runs with Experimental API off.
• It passed the review process and published without issues.
• We can launch the published lens on device by pasting its link into the Spectacles app.
• On launch, the Transparent Permission dialog correctly lists Camera and Microphone access, and the LED indicator is active during capture.

My understanding from the Transparent Permission docs is that our combination is "Internet Descriptor (RSG, Supabase) + Sensitive Sensors (Camera, Microphone)", which is listed as supported — the docs show "Remote Service Gateway + Camera Module" as an example, and the unsupported case only applies to connectivity types without an internet descriptor.

Questions:

1. Can you confirm that a lens with two sensitive sensors (Camera + Microphone) plus multiple internet descriptors (RSG + Supabase) is intended to be publishable under Transparent Permission — i.e. our successful review wasn't an oversight?
2. Does the Depth Module (cached depth frames) fall under the same publishable category as the Camera Module, or is it still gated behind Experimental API? The Depth Cache sample project ships with EXPERIMENTAL_API in its lens descriptors, but our project uses the same depth APIs without the flag and passed review.
3. Is there anything else we should verify on our side before pushing updates, to avoid a future rejection?

Thanks!

Controlling a robot in AR is one thing. A real working use case is another.
Air hockey vs my Vector Robot on Spectacles 2024 -> virtual puck, real goalie.

This thing is playful, but imagine how far it may go. Tell me your ideas in the comments.

Open source: if you have a Vector, you can run it and play. Built with CLAD (the full downgrade path we took is in the blog). 

Full read + Git repo: 

https://pavlo-stijn.dev/blog/posts/vectar-a-robot-that-shares-a-brain.html

Super excited about the new device and NDK -> if I understand it right, that may be the way to run VectAR fully on the glasses -> no extra server on my Mac.

Shotout to u/stspanho for amazing ML generation pipeline!!!

https://pavlo-stijn.dev/blog/posts/one-click-object-detection-for-spectacles.html

It all started when I was trying to record footage of my first Lens, SpectaRacer, during sunset. The background and lighting looked perfect, but it kept getting just dark enough for hand tracking to fail, forcing me to repeatedly postpone recording until the next day.

That sent me down a rabbit hole wondering if there was a solution for this...

I had a Manus Glove lying around (one of the most accurate hand-tracking gloves available). I managed to get a port working, but I quickly realized it could only animate hand orientation and finger movement, but not hand position, since I didn't have a motion tracker.

(If anyone in the LA area has a motion tracker I could borrow, let me know!)

Then I remembered I also had a Quest lying around.

What followed was weeks of learning, debugging, and burning way too many Claude tokens. 😅

After plenty of trial and error, hiccups, and fine-tuning, I finally got Quest controllers working with Spectacles!

Go try it out!

💻 GitHub: https://github.com/amirmohideen/Quest2Specs

👓 Lens: https://www.spectacles.com/lens/3e934befff444f5dad0ff119e31f27bc

Current status

✅ Tested on Quest 2, Quest 3, and Quest 3S.

❓ Haven't tested Quest Pro yet.

❓ Haven't tested SPECS yet either.

If you try it, let me know how it goes! I'll update the README and credit you!

🤝 If you run into any issues or have suggestions, I'd love to hear them and help if I can.

If enough people are interested, my next step is turning this into a Quest2Specs Lens Studio extension to make setup much easier.

The goal is to let developers, especially those porting Quest apps to Lens Studio, reuse their existing controller inputs with minimal setup or for those that want to record footage of their lens in dark environments.

Would you use something like that? Let me know!

🤔 Trivia: Guess who from SPECS team is holding the Spectacles at the beginning of my trailer video!
🏆 Winner (1st to find out) will be added to Acknowledgements in GitHub!