If you were the 26-year-old billionaire CEO of a company built on disappearing chat messages, who was simultaneously engaged to a supermodel, you’d see the world through rose-colored video-recording sunglasses, too.
Over the weekend, Evan Spiegel announced that the popular mobile app Snapchat was dropping the “chat” and becoming a camera company named Snap Inc. On top of that, the company unveiled a new product called Spectacles — sunglasses with built-in video cameras that connect to your smartphone via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi.
Miranda Kerr, that supermodel I mentioned, was certainly proud, and shared a picture of Spiegel on Snapchat Instagram.
Now, I grew up in Rochester, N.Y., hometown of a little camera and film company called Kodak, which fell on hard times and eventually declared bankruptcy because it never really adapted quickly enough to the digital age.
Here I am on the tech-centric West Coast now, watching a 5-year-old digital company valued at $22 billion tell the world that it’s a camera company. Obviously Spiegel and co. aren’t asking users to stick a Brownie on their faces and send a roll of film off to be developed, but when it comes to hardware, Google Glass should have at least served as a recent reminder of the level of nerdiness folks will not stoop to.
But because everything is a memory that has to live outside of your brain in 2016, Spectacles promise to show you a memory “the way you experienced it.” Circular video, like that shot by your eyeballs, plays full screen on any device, in any orientation, Snap says. The human perspective is captured with a 115-degree field of view.
The glasses don’t look so bad either. As a Wall Street Journal profile points out, Spiegel has design chops and “the glasses are the culmination of a years-long development process described by Spiegel as ‘Measure a thousand times, cut once.'”
The design is simple and the three soon-to-be-available colors are eye-catching. They’ll be priced at $130, which sounds expensive for something that could fall off your face and get run over while you’re shooting skateboard Snap videos with your friends.
So, go ahead and tell us via the poll below, whether you would put a pair of Spiegel’s Spectacles on your face.
