News: Snap Spectacles Used to Turn Spoken Word Poetry into an Augmented Reality Experience

From the front lines of mainstreaming augmented reality smartglasses comes the latest update from Snap and its Spectacles wearable.

This time the demonstration of the device's powers comes from a more creative arts perspective.

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New York-based poet and computer programmer Zach Lieberman managed to get his hands on a pair of Spectacles and decided to translate his words into immersive elements using Lens Studio.

The results of the experiment can be seen in a new video posted on Monday which shows Lieberman walking around New York City as his Spectacles smartglasses simultaneously deliver audio and visual presentations of his poetry.

"I think there's something really powerful about how AR can help us engage with the world again," says Lieberman, commenting in the video demo of his Spectacles experiment.

"The next generation spectacles are essentially AR glasses. You put them on and you see a layer on top of the world. I think AR is about having a conversation with the world and adding magic in the world around you."

Lieberman, who co-developed the open source C++ toolkit called OpenFrameworks and has served as a professor at the MIT Media Lab, is possibly one of the best early beta testers to put the AR device through its paces as Snap attempts to discover its various innovative use cases.

And while the practical uses of immersive poetry may not immediately signal widespread applications, these are the kinds of experiments that will eventually give rise to more standard approaches to how we interact with information and data as it moves from our smartphones to our faces via smartglasses.