Enlarge / Snapchat’s new “Spectacles” glasses, which have been copy-and-pasted from Friday’s WSJ report onto the company’s official logo. (credit: Sam Machkovech)
The Snapchat empire will soon see an expansion into physical products. On Friday, company founder Evan Spiegel unveiled the company’s first for-sale product on Friday: Spectacles, a $129 pair of sunglasses with a camera lens mounted to their front.
Spectacles were not announced via Spiegel’s wildly popular social-media app, however, but instead through an exclusive report published by the Wall Street Journal. The report confirms some of the glasses’ technical details, including a 115-degree camera lens, a fisheye rendering effect on any videos taken, and three color options at launch (black, teal, and coral). Tap a button near the hinge, the WSJ reports, and Spectacles will record exactly 10 seconds of video. (A leaked promotional reel for Spectacles turned up at Business Insider before the WSJ‘s report went live showing what the glasses’ video footage will probably look like.)
The glasses, as shown on Spiegel’s face, contain pronounced bulges on both halves of the glasses’ frame and an apparently dime-sized circle on each lens’ upper, outer corner. We only have two official photos and a brief, leaked promo video to go on—and no further technical details from the report—so we’ll have to wait to learn how much on-board memory is filling either of those bulges, what resolution the video will be captured in, and whether the glasses’ processing unit communicates with a nearby smartphone to upload those video captures to Snapchat.
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Source: Ars Technica – Snapchat announces camera-sporting sunglasses, coming this fall for 9