Wailia, Hawaii - No one will confuse me with Willy Mossoni or Minnesota Fats, but with the help of Snap's fifth-generation Spectacles, I nearly sank a shot on the pool table.

The Spectacles were running an augmented reality program that recorded the positions of the cue ball and target and calculated exactly where I needed to aim to sink the shot. Using that data, I released the ball and watched it bounce off the far bumper and roll across the length of the table toward the pocket in the right corner. Admittedly, the ball just rumbled around the edge of the pocket and didn't go in, but had it not been for AR's intervention, it would have almost gone in.

Spectacles' billiard app was developed just last month, when Snap released its fifth-generation smart glasses as a device that developers can rent for $99 per month. Ideally, the glasses would get into the hands of people who could write AR programs and help Snap figure out the exact use cases while they refine the product for release.

Snap hosted a demonstration of its latest Spectacles at Qualcomm's annual Snapdragon Summit this week, offering a Snapdragon chip that supports a variety of apps developed for Spectacles and computer vision capabilities. The Snapdragon chip.

Unlike previous releases, this fifth generation of Snap Spectacles was intended to take photos and videos from a device as discreet as a pair of glasses. Snap created these glasses to help you understand the world and space around you.

I tried several apps, some developed in-house by Snap, others by third-party developers. (Lego and Niantic were among the developers who developed proof-of-concept apps for the glasses.) One demo allowed visitors to use their own hands to make flowers hang from the walls, dangle from the ceiling, or grow out of the floor of the demo space. In another, they could finger-paint around themselves while interacting with the finger-painted creations of others wearing snap-glasses.

It was this demonstration that the Snap representatives were eager to show off. One of the complaints about certain mixed reality headsets and glasses is that they cut you off from other people. Snap wanted to show that you can wear glasses and still be able to work collaboratively with others.

While the demo was certainly interesting, Snap needs a lot of improvement from the design of the glasses. If Buddy Holly saw them, he would think, “That's a bit much. Nevertheless, they are not uncomfortable to wear, and I was not as relieved to take them off as I have been when I have tried other headsets and goggles.

The vision could be wider. When finger painting with others, their work was sometimes cut out of the frame. Otherwise, the display, supported by a micro-projector, looked clean to my eyes.

I was impressed by how quickly I was able to figure out how to operate the glasses, which relied completely on my hands. My left hand essentially became a menu pad, allowing me to exit apps and return to the main screen. There are only two physical controls on the glasses, a button on the left side of the frame for taking pictures and videos, and a power button on the right side.

There will be a natural comparison between Snap's Spectacles and the Meta Orion holographic AR glasses that Meta showed off a month ago. Meta's glasses are also in the prototype stage, but it's not really a fair comparison since Orion's focus is on holographic displays and Meta claims that their device has the widest field of view of any AR glasses. Orion's controls, which include a neural interface powered by a wrist-worn accessory, are a bit finer than the simple pinch and poke gestures I used to control Spectacales.

Snap's Spectacles can currently maintain power for about 45 minutes of continuous use. And ultimately, that's the goal here: by the time these glasses are ready to be offered to the public, Snap will reduce the size of the glasses.

And when that happens, there should be plenty of interesting apps to accompany the new Snap Spectacles.