Snapchat Debuts Rumored Glasses with No Augmented Reality Features

Woman wearing sunglasses and bold lip color against a yellow background.

Snapchat accidentally—and then intentionally—announced their digital eyeglasses, known as Spectacles, over the weekend. While we'd hoped their augmented reality-heavy platform would result in related hardware, Spectacles unfortunately seek to "reinvent" little more than a video camera.

Snapchat, now rebranded as Snap Inc., wants to sell you these plastic sunglasses for $130 a pair, which record a 10-second video and sends it wirelessly to your phone with just a tap.

The new format is known as "circular video," which is pretty much what it sounds like: a perfectly round video clip. This allows for even capture so the clip can display in full screen on your phone, regardless of the device's orientation. While somewhat hard to describe, the format is much easier to understand with some examples, as seen below.

Snap, Inc.

While Snap's new electronic eyewear may not offer the app's augmented reality features, it could represent one of the first wearables for your face that sees reasonably wide adoption. Getting used to gadgets on our face nicely paves the way for more robust (yet subtle) eyeglasses that can do more than record short video. No word if any kind of augmented reality glasses are in the works from Snap, Inc. but we can always hope.

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Cover image by Snap Inc.

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