As the photography saying goes, the best camera is always the camera that you currently have on you. So what if that was literally true? What if you could wear a camera almost 24/7. Thats the promise of Snapchat Spectacles and this week, they feature as our Gizmo Crash. So lets get to know more about them.
Spectacles are the first hardware product from Snap Inc popularly know by their app SnapChat. The aim of the glasses is be able to tie into the Snapchat app, every video you shoot on the glasses is sent right to your smartphone, for you to be able to edit and upload it and share it to your Snapchat friends.
The Spectacles promise to give at least three really good use cases. One is experiential videos, face to face interactions with people you love and finally to be able to make videos that look and feel like memories.
Experiential Videos
Spectacles are good as experiential videos because they leave your hands free and lets your interact with whatever you are doing without having to juggle with a smartphone camera in your hand. For example playing a tennis game with give the users a unique view at the game and get to experience it with you. There is also a really wide-angle lens on the camera that will stretch the image and make things look more exciting. Also while playing with something at arm’s length for example your dog or cat will be a sweet experience.
Face to Face Interactions
The glasses are also good at filming interactions with people and that’s because, Snap Inc went out of its way to make sure that every body knows you are recording. So the Spectacles have a cool friendlier white wheel of light indicator to alert everybody that you are filming them and lets everybody participate in your experience if they want. Part of that is that the camera shoots at 60 frames per second, another part is the wide angle lens which is really actually about the fact that the camera sits exactly at eye level and this experience makes a big difference in the resultant shots and videos. Being able to capture something the way that you saw it is tremendously powerful.
The Spectacle problems
The first issue is that if you shoot a lot of videos with spectacles, transferring the videos will be a pain in the ass. The more videos you shoot, the longer it will take to transfer them to your device. The other issue has to do with the user interface, with spectacles, you shoot the video on the glasses wait for them to transfer, and then once transferred, the app will dump them all into day-by-day groups. So getting to the exact video you want can be bit of a hustle. So if you have not used Snapchat a lot there is definitely a learning curve here.
SnapChat’s Spectacles feel like a preview of whats coming next from Snap Inc now that it views its self as a camera company. They cost $130 (UGX 470,00) , they are also extremely hard to buy even in the States and the video quality isn’t there quiet yet. But, the idea that this product represents is much bigger than we have today.
