The picture and video messaging app is expected to release its Spectacles sunglasses in the US in time for Christmas, priced at about $130 (£100).
The glasses can record 10-second clips that can be sent via Bluetooth to smartphones. The camera has a wider lens than typical smartphones, with a 115 degree angle, and records circular video that is more akin to human vision.
The move could be seen as a response to the recent decision by the rival app Instagram to launch Stories – short videos similar to those that can be posted on Snapchat. Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, which owns Instagram, said recently: “We see a world that is video first, with video at the heart of all of our apps and service.”
Snapchat, which announced it was changing its name to Snap Inc, plans to roll out Spectacles slowly. Evan Spiegel, Snap’s chief executive, told the Wall Street Journal: “It’s about us figuring out if it fits into people’s lives and seeing how they like it.”
He tested a prototype while on holiday with his supermodel fiancee, Miranda Kerr. “It was our first vacation, and we went to Big Sur for a day or two. We were walking through the woods, stepping over logs, looking up at the beautiful trees. And when I got the footage back and watched it, I could see my own memory, through my own eyes. It was unbelievable,” he told the Journal.
“It’s one thing to see images of an experience you had, but it’s another thing to have an experience of the experience. It was the closest I’d ever come to feeling like I was there again.”
Wearable technology does not have an impressive track record so far. Google’s attempt, which delivered news, messages and calls directly to a user’s field of view, was arguably more sophisticated than Spectacles, and considerably more expensive at about £1,000.
Google stopped making Glass in January 2015, but said it remained committed to the idea of smart glasses. The device was on sale in the UK for little more than six months.
