For all Snapchat lovers – The Snap ‘Spectacles’ are finally here!
There’s good news on the horizon for all Snapchat enthusiasts. The multi-billion dollar conglomerate is launching its first hardware – Snap sunglasses, a dream come true for those who spend over forty percent of their day on the highly popular picture-messaging app.
The new product is being called ‘Spectacles’ for simplicity’s sake and is the first of the hardware items that Snap Inc. – as the firm has now been christened – is all set to release. Although the company has been working on this device for a while now, it was only revealed yesterday to a group of reporters in a corner off Venice Beach, California, by the excited 26-year old Co-founder, Evan Spiegel.
According to The Wall Street Journal, this is how the device works. There is a small button on the side of your Spectacles that you click to start your recording. The video you record will have the same span as a normal snap on your phone, with a maximum of ten seconds. This video will sync wirelessly to your smartphone, which will then make it possible for you to share it through the app.
The camera used on this device will use a wider lens than the one used typically on your smartphone. It is a 115-degree angle lens that records a closer visual to the natural eye level. In that sense, the video record fashions itself as a ‘human vision’, showcasing the same portrait of your surroundings that is visible to the naked eye.
Spiegel compares it to re-experiencing an event with your own eyes. “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 WSJ, regarding the recording of a hike he had taken while sporting the prototype of the device. “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,” he added.
One of the greatest selling points of this device is the fact that your arms are now free to do whatever they like instead of being restricted to holding up a smartphone while recording, one of the more pertinent problems faced by avid Snapchat users.
In the face of impeding competition from both the world of social media platforms as well as the old-school competitors enrolled in the gadget-race, Snapchat is playing safe and calling itself a ‘camera company’, considering the domination of companies like Facebook and Twitter in the social media space. It is also lowering the hype around its Spectacles by referring to it as a ‘toy’. It will be made ‘officially’ available to the public in a few weeks, but with a limited supply.
“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,” Spiegel told WSJ.
Critics have begun to compare it to Google’s most seemingly fruitless venture – the Google Glass, but Snapchat is confident that is will garner more sales considering the more ‘conspicuous’ look of the sunglasses. At the same time, it is also entering the markets with a much cheaper rate than the Google Glass, which debuted at $1,500. Considering that most of Snapchat’s users are students with limited allowances, the founders have cleverly marked its selling price at $130 for now.
Snapchat has been listed as the third most popular social media platform this year, according to most media sources. It has about 150 million users across the globe on a daily basis and is available in 20 different languages. The apps feature of pictures disappearing after being viewed once is the answer to all millennial problems, and the company’s sales are only getting higher, with more businesses creating official snapchat pages to reach out to a larger target audience. With the advent of the Spectacles, working as an upgrade to their popular app, there’s no stopping Snapchat from achieving its aim of making a billion dollars in revenue by 2017.