The firm behind Snapchat has made its camera sunglasses available to buy online in the UK, meaning you can now get your circle-framed Spectacles for £129.99 without hunting for a vending machine.
The smart glasses, which come with a built-in video camera and can record images at the touch of a button, are available at Amazonasas well as directly from add-on inc.
To help sell its first foray into the hardware, Snap set up several vending machines in major European cities last month, including Paris, Berlin, Venice, Barcelona and London, the latter located next to the London Eye.
The Spectacles come with a camera embedded in the rim, which records 10-second videos when pressed. The wide-angle, circular-format clips are uploaded to the user’s Snapchat account over a Bluetooth or WiFi connection.
“Our products allow people to express themselves, live in the moment, learn about the world and have fun together,” says Snap, stating that it has reinvented the camera in a way that “will improve the way people live and communicate.”
That rhetoric can fill you with a deep and lingering sadness, but it seems that others are interested in snappers with straps on their faces. The shows have reportedly been a hit in the United States, with to talk of long queues and pairs listed on eBay for figures reaching $1,000 (£775).
“Specs create memories, from your perspective,” Snap’s website says, like a billboard in the background of a dystopian movie.
The Spectacles were part of Snap’s rebranding, before its IPO in March, to be seen as a camera company. As a first effort in that field, the camera glasses are a launch for an older, wealthier demographic compared to its teen-oriented Snapchat app.
CEO Evan Spiegel has said that Snap will “continue to experiment” with the hardware, presumably depending on how well the Spectacles perform globally. If they do take off, expect more bribes from the privacy and security concerns of literally strapping a video camera to your face, not to mention the existential crisis of have your ‘memories’ recorded on a cloud server somewhere cold and remote, ready to be played, shared and liked.
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