SnapChat Glasses - Check Out SnapChat's New Spectacles

Published on September 24, 2016 , in Phone Tweaks, Tech

Snap chat just unveiled Spectacles , a set of connected sunglasses
that record 10-second snippets of video,and it'll sell for about $130 (N56, 000)sometime this fall. It has also rebranded itself as Snap, Inc. — a reflection of a fact that the company now makes more than its flagship app,

Spectacles have a single button that you press to begin
recording your snap, The cameras
employ a 115-degree lens, which the company says more
closely approximates a person's field of vision. And the
cameras record circular video and
effort to create a playback experience that simulates your
natural point of view.

'When I got the footage back and
watched it, I could see my own memory, through my own
eyes — it was unbelievable," Spiegel told the Journal ,
recalling a hike he took wearing the prototype. "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."

"I COULD SEE MY OWN MEMORY,
THROUGH MY OWN EYES"

Snap says it will roll the product out in slow numbers, and
characterized it as a "toy" — although Snapchat itself was often described that way in its early years, and was often
dismissed as as a novelty along the way to 150 million daily users and a valuation in the tens of billions. It opens
up a potentially lucrative new line of business for a company at a time when Facebook and its subsidiaries have
been looting its flagship app for parts .

Lately it has been calling itself "a camera company" rather than a social
network — a canny move given how Facebook dominates online communication.

Spectacles will naturally be compared to Google Glass, Alphabet's mostly fruitless foray into wearable face-based
computing.

But because they are sunglasses, they will be less conspicuous than Google's. They're cheaper, too — not even one-tenth of the price as Glass, which debuted at $1,500. But just as Google did, Snap is marketing Spectacles with a high-fashion gloss. The product debuted in the glossy WSJ Magazine, and Spiegel was photographed wearing Spectacles by fashion icon Karl Lagerfeld.