Snapchat Camera Glasses

Snapchat has announced its first gadget – sunglasses with a built-in camera.

14:12 26 September 2016

Snapchat has announced its first gadget – Spectacles, or sunglasses with a built-in camera that can record up to 30 seconds of video at a time. It will go on sale later this year with a £100 price tag.

 

The messaging app firm also announced the renaming of the company to Snap, Inc. The renaming decision underlined the company’s apparent ambition to go beyond the ephemeral messaging app, a product that is highly popular with young people.   

 

Snap’s 26-year-old creator Evan Spiegel explained the reason why his company made Spectacles. He said: "It was our first vacation, and we went to [Californian state park] Big Sur for a day or two. We were walking through the woods, stepping over logs, looking up at the beautiful trees.

 

"And when I got the footage back and watched it, I could see my own memory, through my own eyes - it was unbelievable.

 

"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."

 

According to the information released by the company, the gadget will record videos in a new, circular format, which can be viewed in any orientation. The battery on the device will last about a day. The gadget has a light in front, which will be automatically turned on when the glasses are recording.

 

Reports suggest that the device is not treated as a major hardware launch.

 

"We’re going to take a slow approach to rolling them out,” Mr Spiegel told the newspaper.

 

“It’s about us figuring out if it fits into people’s lives and seeing how they like it."