Snap Inc.’s Spectacles comes with secret AR filter

We love a good Easter Egg in our tech products and it seems Snap Inc. has been able to hide a useful one in its wearable. The Spectacles have a hidden filter that’s basically an implementation of augmented reality. The tweet by Moshe Isaacian shows that once you point the glasses at the lettering on its protective case, it shows floating bubbles with what looks like snaps of other people or something that Snap Inc. has curated. While not groundbreaking, it shows what else Snap Inc. and Snapchat can do with the hard-to-find smart glasses.

Found a cool @Spectacles secret! If you point your Snapchat camera at package's lettering, it gives you a special filter!

How it works: pic.twitter.com/wPSVpQjk5T

— Moshe Isaacian 💡 (@MosheIsaacian) November 23, 2016

 Source: The Next Web

Snap sells Spectacles through pop-up vending machines

Snap Inc., the company that owns Snapchat, is taking an unusual route to promote its Spectacles. These glasses are the company’s own wearable device to take Snaps (photos and videos) with. Snap starting selling the devices by setting up a big yellow vending machine called the Snapbot on a beach boardwalk in Venice, California. The glasses sell for US$130 and were quickly sold out. If you don’t try and buy the wearables from sellers who have started selling these on eBay for $1,000, the only way to buy Spectacles is through these vending machines. It’s said these will be brought to different locations for a day and the locations will only be shared 24 hours in advance.

Source: Reuters

Snapchat ventures into hardware with Spectacles

The social media giant Snapchat (now called Snap Inc.) is moving beyond its ephemeral video and messaging app into hardware territory. The company just released smart glasses called Spectacles that’ll lets its users record first-person, 10-second clips at a time. These clips can then be sent via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi to your Snapchat app. Think of it as a more millennial-friendly Google Glass or even something like a more portable GoPro. To record clips, you just tap a button mounted on frames. A ring of tiny lights will light up to indicate that you’re currently recording. The camera-glasses makes use of 115-degree-angle lens that looks similar to the human eye’s natural field of view and can be played back in landscape or portrait on your phone. These glasses come in black, teal, and coral and will retail for US$129.99 (around CA$170). Battery life is expected to last a full day out.

A limited number of these glasses will be released. According to Snap Inc.’s CEO Evan Spiegel, “We’re going to take a slow approach to rolling them out. It’s about us figuring out if it fits into people’s lives and seeing how they like it.”

Source: CNET + The Verge