Greg's Corner

Snapchat announces video recording glasses

The company behind the ubiquitous photo sharing and messaging Snapchat, has changed their name to Snap Inc., and that wasn’t even their big announcement of the weekend. Snap announced that they were releasing video recording sunglasses called Spectacles.

For some this brings back memories of the controversial Google Glass. While Google Glass was planned to be a wearable computing device, it ended up not being much more than a video recorder. The main controversy with that aspect of Google Glass was that people could be recorded without them knowing about it, leading to some establishments in the Bay Area to ban Google Glass. Snap claims that Spectacles will not have this issue as they have a set of lights that will light up whenever it’s recording. Also, since they’re sunglasses, you would notice if you were being recorded indoors since the recorder would be wearing sunglasses indoors. Another reason that Spectacles could be more successful that Google Glass is accessibility. While Glass was $1500 a pair, Spectacles are said to be listed at $130.

The question is, since most people have cameras on their phones do we need another type of camera? Snap CEO Evan Spiegel seems to think so.

“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.”

Will that experience be enough for consumers to part with their money? In these days of virtual and augmented realities, it just might.