Recently Snapchat launched their own brand of sunglasses with a built-in video camera aimed at capturing life’s most beautiful moments in first-person. Awesome or creepy? That’s up for debate.
The glasses are called “Spectacles” and are available from the snap bot (a vending machine that changes location in the USA every 2 days, to random places like the bottom of the grand canyon) or from the pop up store that opened in November opposite the Apple store in NYC, or from eBay – if you want to pay between 800and 4000% more than the retail price, which is around £100.
The glasses only record up to 30 seconds of video in 10 second clips, so that’s not a lot of footage. I imagine it could be used to capture moments like your first bungee jump and things like that. Not so good for recording anything that takes a bit longer – like a party or a concert.
Recorded videos are pushed to the memories section of Snapchat and captured in a new 115 degree, human vision-like circular video format, which can be viewed in both portrait or landscape.
Now although they do seem like a cool concept, I can’t help but be reminded of an episode of Black Mirror I watched recently called “The entire history of you”. If you haven’t seen it here is the trailer:
It is based in the future and in it everyone has access to a memory implant that records everything they do, see, and hear. The device allows the user to go back and watch real time footage of events that happened. Think of it as sky plus but for the brain.
In theory, you could use this sort of device to watch back some of your favourite moments in life (the day you got married etc) to pass the time on public transport and things like that, but of course this is Black Mirror so it gets a lot more sinister than that. I don’t want to give any spoilers away but I would recommend watching it as it’s well made and a very interesting concept. An almost real concept with the release of the “Spectacles”!
Well, sort of. Although it only records 30 seconds of footage so it’s unlikely that it will ruin anyone’s life just yet. But maybe this is the first step to a creepy dystopian future where everything you say or do is recorded and stored in a database which can be accessed by anyone at any time, thus putting you in a perpetual state of anxiety and paranoia. Yes, I’m writing this with a tin-foil hat on.
Although I think the most likely outcome of this is that they will end up bombing for similar reasons to the Google Glasses that came out in 2013 which you can read about here. A fun new gadget which we will leave for the geeks to play with and then write mean reviews online, never to be seen again.
Maybe I’m wrong, what do you think? Tweet us @StrategySMedia or Like us on Facebook.