Saturday, September 24, 2016

Snapchat Launches Spectacles with Camera

BBC, WSJ, Business Insider, Snap: Snapchat launches its first hardware product, a camera equipped sunglasses named Spectacles. Simultaneously the company changes its name to Snap to reflect that its activity expands beyond the smartphone application. Now, Snap home page says:

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel wearing Spectacles

Spectacles’ camera uses a 115-degree lens, said to be much closer to the eyes’ natural field of view. On a tap on the button near the hinge, it records up to 10 sec of video from your first-person vantage (30 sec, according to BBC). Each new tap records another clip. Spectacles will be available this fall for $130.

One of the differentiators of the Spectacles camera is the round format of its video output. The rectangular format is said to be the one of the past when photos were made to print on paper. Now, they are used in a different way:



3 comments:

  1. I personally don't believe in a broad commercial success of AR glasses like this one. First, most snapchat users are quite egocentric's personalities and rather like to take selfies of themselves so glasses are useless in that sense. Secondly, although cool design, price of these glasses is still too expensive too enable a really broad adoption from young generations. Thirdly, I believe most people would not like to feel they are actually filmed by their own friends in this such intriguing intrusive way (psychologically speaking, it is not the same as someone taking a picture of you from its smartphone). Lastly, who is interested to watch on a regular basis this large quantity of low quality shootages (I would personally rather go for a real action CAM like GoPro or others at the end if I want to cover outdoor achievements... and by the way my smartphone camera is always in my pocket :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Indeed Anonymous, you have been right: see article here https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/28/why-snapchat-spectacles-failed/

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