Snapchat reportedly has 'hundreds of thousands' of unsold Spectacles

Only slightly related: I was talking to a parent friend of mine a while back, and we both agreed (he owns a pair) that Snapchat Spectacles are an amazing accessory for parents.

Kids are easily distracted, so if you point a phone at them it'll completely throw them off whatever cute activity it was they were just doing - probably because they now want to play with your phone. No such problem with Spectacles - and not only that, it means you can keep two hands free (not a small issue when one arm might already have a child in it).

The problem is that Spectacles are so tied into Snapchat that it makes sharing the output very difficult. Grandma and Grandpa are not going to use Snapchat, and I'm not sure Snapchat wants them to. You can, eventually, import into Snapchat then export single videos back out again, but they lose the cool display method for circular videos and look awful. But I think they could shift a lot of these glasses with a little rebranding and a spin-off app just for importing videos into whatever destination you want. They'll never do that, though.

Is it because they’re hideous? Going by the article header pic alone.

More seriously, it’s a niche product and Google Glass made everyone wary about wearing cameras in their face everywhere (or showed that people were inherently wary.) Of course sales were going to be limited.

There are probably some really good applications for camera-glasses, though. Record-keeping and quality control fir high-skilled manual workers, for instance.

Surely they could generate some interest with give aways and events?

"Snap Inc. is a camera company"