Want a pair of Spectacles, the new camera equipped sunglasses from the company formerly known as Snapchat? That’ll be $130. Assuming you live in Los Angeles.
Oh, you don’t live in LA? Then you should probably start saving. It looks like $500 will do it, if you’re quick. You could even pick up a job lot of five for the low, low price of $2,000!
That’s right, the Spectacles are the latest tech product to hit the shops in limited quantities and then be rapidly snapped up by eBay resellers. It happened with iPhones, it happened with the Nintendo Wii, and now Spectacles.
There’s an added twist to the story, though, because Snap Inc has also chosen to limit the availability of the Spectacles in new and interesting ways. They are only available from purpose-built anthropomorphic vending machines, or “Snapbots”, of which there is just one in the world, outside Snap’s headquarters in Venice Beach, California.
Whether you are planning on queuing up, or splashing out the best part of a month’s rent on eBay, there’s one other thing to be aware of: no outlet has actually had a chance to review the Spectacles yet. Snap says that the “limited availability” means it won’t have any available for the press to preview, so you’ll be splashing out quite a lot of cash on the unknown.
If you live outside the US, don’t hold your breath: Snapchat hasn’t said anything about its plans for the UK and Europe.
The Spectacles follow on from Google’s ill-fated Glass experiment, which aimed to put a camera and screen on a pair of glasses. Snap has no screen, and worked to make the camera less intrusive and more spontaneous: users can record 10-second video clips by tapping the side of the frame, which are then sent to a connected smartphone over a Bluetooth link.
Unlike normal Snapchat videos, the spectacles record in a new “circular” video format. That doesn’t mean it loops: instead, the spectacles use a very wide-angle lens to film the wearer’s whole field of view, and then crop out the centre portion to show the viewer, letting them see the action with their phone’s full screen no matter how they’re holding it.
