Spectacles are the camera-equipped sunglasses that were introduced earlier this year by the company formerly known as Snapchat. The glasses were announced at the same time that Snapchat, now known as Snap, Inc., started calling itself a “camera company.”
At a really high level, Spectacles are all about giving Snapchat users a more immediate way to record videos (but not photos) that get sent right back into the app. They are supposed to remove the last few layers of friction from the already pretty frictionless process of recording video with your smartphone. Spectacles also let you capture the world around you without removing you from that world. And Snap thinks Spectacles will let you capture things from a unique perspective.
Spectacles are going to up many people’s Snapchat game, but I can’t get past the power of capturing moments I never had a chance to capture pic.twitter.com/htjmMAEn8Z
— Sean O’Kane (@sokane1) November 18, 2016
After using Spectacles for about a week, I found most of these things to be true. The glasses offer the quickest means of recording a short 10- to 30-second video clip, shorter than even the amount of time a GoPro would take were you to have one strapped on at all times. Spectacles make it possible to capture those moments without needing to stare at or through your phone’s screen — though the time you spend away from your phone when using Spectacles winds up going right back into the process of reviewing and posting those videos to Snapchat.