The Snapchat empire will soon expand into physical products. On Friday, company founder Evan Spiegel unveiled the company's first for-sale product: Spectacles, a $129 pair of sunglasses with a video camera built into their front. (UK price TBC, but probably around ?110.)
Instead of being announced on Spiegel's wildly popular social-media app, Spectacles were announced through an exclusive report published by the Wall Street Journal. The report confirms some of the glasses' technical details, including a 115-degree camera lens, a fisheye rendering effect on any videos taken, and three color options at launch (black, teal, and coral). Tap a button near the hinge, the WSJ reports, and Spectacles will record exactly 10 seconds of video. (A leaked promotional reel for Spectacles that turned up at Business Insider before the WSJ's report went live shows what the glasses' video footage will probably look like.)
The glasses, as shown on Spiegel's face, contain pronounced bulges on both halves of the frame and an apparently dime-sized circle on each lens' upper, outer corner. We only have two official photos and a brief, leaked promo video to go on?and no further technical details from the report?so we'll have to wait to learn how much on-board memory fills those bulges, what resolution the video will be captured in, and whether the glasses' processing unit communicates with a nearby smartphone to upload those video captures to Snapchat.
In the report, Spiegel describes the first time he tested the hardware on a vacation with his girlfriend in the admittedly Snap-worthy locale of Big Sur, California. "When I got the footage back and watched it, I could see my own memory, through my own eyes?it was unbelievable," Spiegel tells the WSJ. "It?s one thing to see images of an experience you had, but it?s another thing to have an experience of the experience. It was the closest I?d ever come to feeling like I was there again."
Spiegel tries to lower expectations for Spectacles when he compares them to a "toy," while the article's author compares the glasses to Google's ambitious but woe-ridden Google Glass wearable hardware. "[Spectacles] risk provoking, as anyone who recalls the saga of Google Glass knows, a fair amount of ridicule the moment they begin to appear on the pimpled faces of America's teens," WSJ reporter Seth Stevenson writes. He also reported the company's official name change to Snap, Inc. "because its offerings now go beyond the Snapchat app." The article didn't hint at any further app or hardware announcements to come.
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Originally Posted by Hans de Vries
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