Snap Into Virtual Reality
When I saw this image juxtaposing Snapchat Spectacles to Google Glass, I couldn’t help but remember my favorite parts about my own adventures with Google Glass: capturing photos and videos, handsfree, from a first person point of view. I mean, who wouldn’t want all their memories to look this natural?
In 2013, I traveled around the world with Google Glass to document the reactions of people using and seeing ocular technology for the first time. I didn’t do this for money or because I thought Google Glass was going to be a consumer success. I did it because I was motivated to document people’s varying experiences and perspectives of the first “consumer” ocular device on the market. And boy, did they vary — from a quick embrace in Spain to disdain in Germany to innovation speculation in India.
What did I learn overall?
Where Glass was not feared as another technological intrusion into our privacy (Germany), people wanted it to easily capture moments from a first person point of view.
And this is why Spectacles will be huge.
Spectacles are a focused, sleek, device with one intent: to capture moments from a first person point of view. Snapchat CEO, Evan Spiegel, earmarked the device as a ‘toy’ because if it were framed as anything beyond, Spectacles would be torn apart for all the things it could NOT do or do well, in the same way that Google Glass was.
With a much less painful price tag ($130 VS Glass’s $1500) and advertising help from Snapchat’s multi-million follower scions such as DJ Khaled, Kylie Jenner and Evan Spiegel’s fiancé, Miranda Kerr, Spectacles will break through the barrier that Glass could not — it will be “cool” to wear a recording device on your face and instances where we’re out in the world recording our interactions (like the one above), will become the norm.
The method of video playback, however, is where Spectacles’ magic breaks and where virtual reality comes in.
Spectacles record video at a 115° field of view, which doesn’t make playback ideal on a phone. In fact, I believe these Snaps are meant to be watched the same way they were recorded: right in front of your eyes. Today what’s recorded on Spectacles will be played back on our mobile phones, but as the “toy” grows up, what’s recorded on Spectacles will be watched on Spectacles
In this (likely) case, Spectacles will move Snap’s focus on augmented reality into virtual reality since viewing/experiencing content in an immersive way, is by definition, a form of virtual reality. After all, people already say Snapchat teleports you to other places, which follows very similar language that people use to describe when experiencing “virtual reality”.
Spectacles will also have 2 cameras, leading many to believe that there will be future implications for 3D capture (potentially incorporating Seene’s 3D computer vision technology Snap Inc. acquired earlier this year), AR filters, and more in future generations.
Another breadcrumb that Snap is heading in a virtual direction was confirmed by Josh Farkas, CEO of Cubicle Ninjas, who tweeted earlier this year that he received an offer he “could not refuse” for the @SpectacleVR twitter handle and later changed their app’s name to Filter, as reported by UploadVR.
We need to stop thinking about AR and VR as two different industries and start thinking of them as a symbiosis of one another. Their success is intertwined in ways that seem hazy now, but that revisionist history will make seem clear.
Ultimately, consumers don’t care about the separation (or the nomenclature), they just want technology that works, entertains them, and improves their lives. While today we view AR and VR as separate, Spectacles will be the first step to bridging this gap and creating one umbrella industry with different defining features.
Check out what we’re building: svrf.com
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