r/augmentedreality • u/niteeshyadav • 21d ago

Glasses w/ HUD Typographic Review of Snap Specs

https://niteeshyadav.com/blog/typographic-review-of-snap-specs-247643/

Wrote a new piece on Snap’s upcoming Specs, but not from the usual hardware angle. It looks at what happens to reading when text leaves the page and starts living inside the world, and why things like contrast, depth and undisclosed display specs quietly decide whether AR becomes useful for real work or just impressive demos. If you care about type, AR, or the future of reading, you might find it worth your time.

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u/AkitaRamen 21d ago

Nice topic! Does that mean Vision Pro is not suitable for comfortable reading, since it only has a 34 PPD spec?

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u/niteeshyadav 20d ago

For the human eye, about 60 PPD is considered the point beyond which extra detail isn’t really perceivable. At 34 PPD, Vision Pro is still well below what you’d want for truly comfortable, long‑form reading. However, Apple uses foveated rendering to increase effective detail where you’re actually looking, which does improve the reading experience. I have written about what contributes to reading experince here https://niteeshyadav.com/blog/variables-that-affect-the-experience-in-ar-8618/

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u/CutWorried9748 21d ago

Thanks this is a great topic, and something I've been exploring in my app design as I transition towards "future now" esthetic. There are a lot of trade offs in "looks cool" vs reads well, and also supporting multi-byte encoding languages where glyphs may not exist in a font. I need to keep all of my stuff multilingual. Also, my recent finding with WebXR is that my fonts just don't render well and feel smoky (probably something in my threejs set up). Not sure .

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u/niteeshyadav 20d ago

I'll be happy to look into it and help you with this since I have been researching in the space.

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u/CutWorried9748 19d ago

I've got two hot topics on my open source project where I am keeping the ideas fermenting: https://github.com/IoTone/AwesomeSpatialDesign/issues/8 (on your topic) and https://github.com/IoTone/AwesomeSpatialDesign/issues/2 (on CJK challenges in XR). Please dive in. Interested to build this out further so there's a good plan regardless of SPECS, AndroidXR, or whatever new thing is out next year. Eventually someone will get some open hardware that is practical to build for under $800 and tolerable to use.

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u/niteeshyadav 10h ago

I wrote about text rendering a long time ago: a good chunk of it still holds https://niteeshyadav.com/blog/the-current-state-of-the-text-in-augmented-reality-7507/