Snapchat has launched its first-ever physical product: a pair of sunglasses.
Today, Snapchat announced ‘Spectacles’, a pair of glasses with a built-in camera and, of course, Snapchat integration. At the touch of a button, you can record short 10-second video clips, and upload them straight to your rolling Snapchat story. The Spectacles are set to go on sale later this year, and will cost $129.99 (£100) at launch.
According to Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, the glasses have a number of advantages over just using your smartphone. Firstly, the integrated camera has a 115-degree-angle lens, which is wider than most smartphone cameras. Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Spiegel described using an early prototype of the Spectacles early last year, during a hike with his supermodel fiancée Miranda Kerr:
“It was our first vacation, and we went to Big Sur for a day or two. We were walking through the woods, stepping over logs, looking up at the beautiful trees. And when I got the footage back and watched it, I could see my own memory, through my own eyes—it was unbelievable. 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.”
The Spectacles will roll out slowly at first and, apparently, aren’t intended to generate significant revenue quickly. Spiegel reportedly refers to the glasses as a toy, and says that the shades wirelessly sync to your smartphone – that’s where the main computing is done. Spiegel is quoted as saying: “We’re going to take a slow approach to rolling them out. It’s about us figuring out if it fits into people’s lives and seeing how they like it.”
Snapchat is one of the world’s largest social networks; over 60% of smartphone users aged between 13 and 34 are on the app. The platform handles over one billion Snaps a day and, as of June 16, serviced 150 million users each day.
The new spectacles sound similar to Glass, Google’s ill-fated smart glasses that were killed off in early 2015, after having been on general sale for just seven months. But in late 2015, Google filed an application with the FCC for a new version of Glass, so Snapchat’s Spectacles could soon have another rival.
