Snapchat launches Spectacles V2
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I'd gladly pay more than $150 for that ability, but I just don't think Spectacles are it.
Someone, sometime, will crack that nut, though, and I'll gladly throw them my money. Google seems to be trying to do it with Clips [0].
[0] - https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17055618/google-clips-sma...
I know there is probably a dystopian future that could come from such a product, but, well, my daughter will only be 2 once.
I'm working on a non-cloud replacement with Raspberry Pis, where all of them are continuously recording and saving to local storage. That's the easy part, haven't figured out clip extraction and when I do I'll replace the Nests.
Have you heard of ZoneMinder?
The main issue he had, though, was that Spectacles forces you to use Snapchat. And grandma and grandpa aren't about to install Snapchat just for this. They need to make it much easier to export directly from the glasses to the camera roll, but Snapchat has no vested interest in doing that. So I hope to see a different company come along with a similar project one day.
You can search on Amazon in Electronics : Security & Surveillance for spy glasses to see a listing that may be what you want.
That is like asking why anyone wants to record anything. Why make home movies? Why take a picture? Why write down a thought?
Those memories have no intrinsic value, but they are very precious. Being able to revisit them A/V is invaluable.
I have 3. 15, 14, and 7. I'd give anything to have more of their precious moments saved so that I could reminisce and stroll through those periods once more.
Gay folks can do it too but the process is more complex.
2) I'd like to directly access the captured moments from my camera roll. I don't use SnapChat.
3) I'd like a more innocuous design than Spectacles. I don't mind a "recording indicator", but the style doesn't really fit a 30 year old dad.
I realize I am not a fit for Spectacles target market. However, I think the market for what I want is a) quite large, b) much more willing to spend.
Just sayin... :)
This is how Google Clips should have worked. You can't trust AI algorithms to know exactly when something should be recorded. But, if they're constantly recording and throwing away video, then imagine yelling "Ok Google, record that" to your Google Home, it could instruct all the Clips you have in your house to save the last 2 minutes, then give you an interface to select and edit the videos you want.
How Google didn't think of this integration is beyond me. Sometimes they live twenty years in the future. Sometimes they miss things that are so blatantly obvious that Microsoft has a solution already.
But I also question the motive. This idea that we need to record everything for the future is very recent, definitely motivated by human psychology to collect things and escape the clutches of time. We've lived for thousands of years without it. Why do we need it now? Nostalgia? We already know that Facebook and Insta are bad for your brain by showing you the "surface perfect" lives that all your friends seem to live.
What, then, is the psychological impact of living in the "beautiful past" instead of the moment. You're trading time and money today to collect these. When we recall memories, especially positive ones, our brains add imperceptible flair to them, helping us cherish them even more. This is lost when we take and watch videos of everything, recording the absolute truth of moments in our past. We post them to Facebook. We embarrass our children later in life with them. Its... weird.
A reasonably designed, classy glass with the camera not too obvious will do it for me. Will pay $300-400. Already paying that for simple designer glasses.
https://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word
"MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language -- so he wired up his house with videocameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son's life, then parsed 90,000 hours of home video to watch "gaaaa" slowly turn into "water." "
Is there any word on why this is? These would be a lot better if I could just click the button on the glasses and have it post to my story automatically (I understand this means the user wouldn't be able to add any overlay effects but I feel like the vantage point of the video is the main attraction to posting it in the first place). With this friction it makes the process a bit less sexy.
I wonder if they built a proprietary video codec for this or whether they were able to adapt an existing one to circular content.
Also, people are used to spending hundreds of dollars on nice sunglasses, it is clever to go after that spending. $150 for sunglasses merged with a gopro is amazing.
I'm not a big snapchat user but I respect them very much for shipping this product.
A circle has an area of pir^2. And it fits just inside a square whose sides are length 2r, and whose area is thus (2r)^2 or 4r^2.
Therefore, the circle fills pi/4 of the square. So only 21.5% of the pixels are wasted.
It gets worse if they use a rectangular sensor, though. With a 4:3 rectangular sensor, it's 41.1% wasted. For 3:2, it's 47.6%. And for 16:9, it's 55.8% wasted.
If not it might as well just be square,
Is it though? Within the app maybe, but what if you want to pull the video off and say, post it to youtube? Outside of the snapchat walled garden, a round video will look absurd.
>$150 for sunglasses merged with a gopro is amazing.
It's not a gopro, it doesn't have (real) HD, it records round videos, and can only record for a maximum of 30 seconds. I cannot think of any overlap in use-case between this and a gopro.
10 seconds of video, up to 30 if you keep poking the thing? Some commenters are acting like it's a gopro, it's not even close. How frequently are you doing something you want to record that exceeds 30 seconds?
Not to mention the round output, not a bad thing for a casual social media post, but what if you want literally anything other than that?
Oh, and of course your $150 purchase will only work through a proprietary app that adds another step to getting your pictures and media out.
Hard pass.
It's too bad they didn't take content curation a little more seriously (or personalized, at least). The in-app content seemed almost revolutionary in the beginning, especially those from more serious publishers that explored one topic over multiple high-design pages. It turned into AOL before it had time to mature.
https://camelcamelcamel.com/Snapchat-Inc-Spectacles-1-0-Sung...
Their initial release was admittedly sad. Made them extremely difficult to buy and then it turned out they lost $40,000,000 on unsold inventory.
First 20% of the article.
It's a dual-use tech.
The consumers will be the ones fronting the cost for and implementing further mass surveillance and state infiltration into our private and personal life.
They probably studied it, asked customers to try it, etc...
Lets see what a billion dollar company comes up with. If nothing else, it pushes innovation a little forward.
Granted I'm a bit old for their target demographic but it's a ghost town as far as I can see (when I open it once a month). Seems like everyone has migrated to Instagram Stories.
Preferably with a sleek design that doesn't scream "I am wearing a computer on my face."
- yellow ring is gone
- you can click photos
- exports are always HD
If this is the entire list then I dunno how snap plans to sell them any better than v1.
- different colors
- Faster video transfers
- waterproof
- slimmer frames with nicer colours
- prescription options
Also the article lists most of the features in the first paragraph, so I hardly consider that a legitimate criticism of the content.
> Photos, not just video. No yellow ring alerting people to the camera. Underwater-capable. Classier colors with lighter lenses. Prescription options. Faster syncing. And a much slimmer frame and charging case.
Techcrunch should have sold out for a bit more.
1. But a $150 product and
2. Wear it even if you don't want to?
As someone else has pointed out, although they are certainly more stylish that Google Glass and Spectacles v1, their design is still pretty ugly (IMO). I think if they really wanted to crack into the celebrities/fashion market, they should have worked with an actual high-end fashion designer to get nicer designs.
Whatever happened to Privacy Visor? As stupid as I'd look walking around with those crazy glasses, it seems like it's becoming the sane way to live.
You have to disconnect your phone from WiFi to connect to the glasses' WiFi to transfer data? I'm not interested in trying to get those glasses connected to WiFi, but I'm also not sure this is a better option.
I'm guessing that since most people will be using these outdoors, losing WiFi won't be that big of a deal
(And GoPros also use wifi to download, which is what me made me think of it in reply to you.)
I just don't get it... Let me plug the camera into my laptop (or phone through bluetooth I guess) and set it up to connect to My home wifi, or my beach house's wifi and I'm done.
I bought a $28 smart outlet. You open up the app, press a button on the outlet for 5 seconds, and they are sync'd. You add your WiFi password. Now, obviously the outlet is stationary, whereas your glasses move with you. So you'd think you would sync to your phone with bluetooth, and let it do the uploading.
Oh. The article. It does sync over bluetooth. 7-second press of a button. Makes sense. Where did you see that you have to disconnect your phone WiFi?
syncing != exporting
[0]: https://support.spectacles.com/hc/en-us/articles/36000040694...
Right now our users still have to pull out their phone and take a picture when they're eating and it turns out that a lot of people forget to do it.
I'd also be interested in something like the spectacles but as a small clip on camera that I could stick on any glasses / my shirt. Google clip is a bit too big.
As long as the geeks shout innovation on cheap money we'll bank on the idiocracy of the masses.