Snapchat will release its first wearable product this fall. It’s called Spectacles, and it’s a $130 pair of glasses that, with a tap to the side of the frame, will record 10 seconds of whatever you’re seeing. According to a报告Wall Street Journal, the glasses film 115-degrees wide to mimic human perception, and record a round image that creates videos outside the bounds of standard rectangular cropping.
眼镜有厚实的框架和鲜艳的色彩，它们将由Snap Inc.（公司的新名称）出售。Snap的计划比Snapchat应用程序更宏伟，并涉及将Snapchat的精神扩展到硬件领域。正如首席执行官埃文·斯皮格尔（Evan Spiegel）在WSJ:
Spiegel refers to it as a toy, to be worn for kicks at a barbecue or an outdoor concert—Spectacles video syncs wirelessly to a smartphone, making it easily shareable. “We’re going to take a slow approach to rolling them out,” says Spiegel. “It’s about us figuring out if it fits into people’s lives and seeing how they like it.”
Why make this product, with its attendant risks, and why now? “Because it’s fun,” he says with another laugh.
Fun is certainly not the only reason Snap is getting into wearables. But fun is why they’ll be a hit, at least compared to other techie glasses like Glass. Rather than attempting to disguise the wearable as a normal pair of glasses, or position it as a serious product, the company is embracing the sensational side of the concept. It’s an approach that sounds a lot like its app: if there’s one company that’s capable of making you look like an idiot in public for fun–making faces at your own camera and totally not caring that you do–it’s Snap.
Just look at those thick frames, presented in an electric robin’s egg blue. They’re self-assured. Overt. Capable of holding a battery, sure. And not trying to hide the two big cameras in the corners, each highlighted by an LED ring, which is most certainly for lowlight shooting.
It’s a design as confident as any millennial on Snapchat, which goes to show that, even though the product is really just a hands-free camera rather than some advanced augmented reality system, Snapchat isn’t repeating the mistakes of theill-fated Google Glass–or even the looming limitations of Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets orMicrosoft’s Hololens。Google Glass是Garish和Cyborgian（我们现在可以说，对吗？我们最终都可以同意吗？）。但是它很难不做。当然，它将计算机放在您的耳朵上，但是第一个型号的整个框架都是作为线框构建的，希望它能在您的脸上消失。相反，玻璃变成了a symbol of both our tech-fueled distractionand the invasiveness of the digital age. Not a good look!
但事实是，可穿戴的摄像头吓坏了。当我穿着时，我就了解了Momento相机–which automatically took photos with very similar shoot-on-demand functionality to Spectacles–for a month on my shirt when my son was born. Some of the photos were amazing, irreplaceable, first-person moments I would have never photographed with a real camera. Yet, time and time again, friends and family would visit, take a look at the discrete camera clipped to my shirt, and tense up. They felt spied on, as if they were visiting a surveillance state. It’s no wonder that the most ubiquitous wearable camera today is probably the one used by police forces.
因此，带有一种新型可穿戴眼镜进入快照。它们是后型，笨拙的，笨拙且勇敢的，尤其是考虑到它们只能在缓慢的推出中提供，而Snap测试市场，一定会在假期中售罄。在这一点上，我的问题不是眼镜是否会立即受到打击 - 我显然相信它们会成为现实 - 而是他们从这里和UX方面从这里走的地方。因为如果有一家具有技术和思维方式的公司来改变年轻人看待世界的方式，那就快了。希望他们不会在此过程中阻止太多。
[All Images: viaSpectacles]