Why You're Going To Want Snapchat Spectacles

Last night, Snapchat finally revealed their project for hardware - a pair of $129.99 sunglasses that can record 10 seconds of video from your first person vantage point, and allows you to post them directly to your "Memories" in your story. Spectacles’ camera uses a 115-degree-angle lens, wider than a typical smartphone’s and much closer to the eyes’ natural field of view. The video it records is circular, more like human vision. They'll be available in black, coral, and teal.

This is going to be HUGE.

1. The price point. $129 is low for a brand new piece of technology. A GoPro is $199. The Apple Watch debuted at $349. Google Glass were $1600. Although those are all fundamentally different devices, low cost of the Spectacles means they move into the "impulse" or "gift for someone else" purchase category. At $129, you might decide between buying a pair of Oakleys, Ray-Bans, or Spectacles. This pricing is a wise move on the part of Snapchat Product Management. Even if you break them or find out they're not what you hoped they were, $129 can be what you might have spent on sneakers or dinner out with your significant other.

2. People want wearables. When the Apple Watch was first announced, even before it was released, people would stop me on the street to ask about my Samsung Galaxy Gear watch. They would ask how it worked, what it could do, and how I got one before Apple released it. Clearly, people want something that can save them from digging their phone out of their purse or pocket, unlocking it (using a PIN or fingerprint) to do a simple task. That process of finding, removing, unlocking, and using is long overdue to be re-engineered.

3. Capturing "First-Person" views hands-free and inconspicuously. One of my personal pet-peeves is people who hold up their phones at concerts instead of just enjoying the show (or even worse, hold up their iPads).

 Being able to take video inconspicuously will be a dramatic shift in how we view watching the lives of others. I've been saying that your Story is your own TV show - although no one will ever offer me a show on network television, I don't care because I can create my own easily in 10 second increments. Snapchat, on any day, "reaches 41 percent of all 18-to-34-year-olds in the United States, while an average TV network in the top-15 for the same demographic reaches six percent," according to the Wall Street Journal. Once video can be taken, hands-free, and uploaded directly with no interaction though the handset, I expect that percentage of 18-to-34 year olds reached to climb even higher.

4. Capturing Memories. Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel describes testing a prototype of Spectacles on a hike he went on last year. “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. 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.” A couple of years ago, I met a Google employee on the train wearing Google Glasses and got the opportunity to ask him a few questions. He described a day he recorded a conversation with his elderly grandmother while they cooked together. He asked her about her childhood, her family growing up, and other questions about her life. He told me that when he went back to watch the footage, he forgot he had recorded that, but was so glad he did for the day his grandmother might not be round anymore. Those memories will be great to show his future children their great-grandmother in an informal, yet memorable, setting.

5. Bring users back to Snapchat. 6 weeks ago, Instagram announced Stories, a direct competitor to Snapchat. I doubt I'm the only one who moved from Snapchat to Instagram when Instagram Stories were announced. It instantly gave me a wider audience, and I can easily get 3x the views I would get on Snapchat and much more engagement. I find that people are watching my stories who don't even follow me - they're browsing my Instagram profile, see that I've posted a story, and take the time to watch. They're deciding if they want to follow me based on my story. That's a powerful tool Snapchat can't compete with currently because they lack tools to easily discover new users. But Spectacles could easily shift me back to using Snapchat - until someone comes up with an easy way to post from Spectacles to Instagram Stories (or Instagram blatantly copies Snapchat again).

Personally, I hate pulling out my phone to take pictures of things or having someone near me realize they're about to be in a video. But taking photo or video of an experience, hands-free, without making anyone uncomfortable could be a fundamental shift in how we capture our memories. 

Snapchat has created a game-changer.

Thanks for reading! I'm Daniel Hill.I talk about social media, technology, and relationships. I just created a mini-course called "How to Create a Compelling Snapchat or Instagram Story (Even If You're Over 40!)" that you can find here.