Spectacles (product)
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Black Spectacles with charging cable in a yellow charging case.
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| Developer | Snap Inc. |
| Manufacturer | Snap Inc. |
| Type | Smartglasses |
| Release date | November 10, 2016 |
| Camera | 115° field of view |
| Platform | Snapchat |
| Online services | Snapchat |
| Backward compatibility |
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| Website | spectacles |
Spectacles are a pair of smartglasses developed and manufactured by Snap Inc., announced on September 23, 2016, during Snap Inc's rebrand from Snapchat Inc. and released on November 10. They are made for Snap's image messaging and multimedia platform Snapchat and were initially distributed exclusively through Snap's pop-up vending machine, Snapbot. On February 20, 2017, Snap Spectacles became available for purchase online.
In December 2014 Snap Inc., then Snapchat Inc., acquired Vergence Labs, the developers of the Epiphany Eyewear smartglasses. Epiphany Eyewear, which recorded wide-angle point-of-view videos, had been positioned as Vergence's first step toward eventually building biometrically-controlled augmented reality glasses which they hoped would someday "give people what would previously be called superpowers". However, due to Vergence's extremely small engineering team (consisting solely of electrical engineer Jon Rodriguez, software engineer Peter Brook, and mechanical engineer David Meisenholder), the company had to scale back its ambitions in order to ship a much simpler first product, Epiphany Eyewear, which they could manage to deliver despite the extremely limited size of their team. The successful development and launch of this minimum-viable product led to the company being noticed by Snapchat, which quietly acquired them, bringing them in-house to develop a similar but much more powerful and refined eyewear product for Snapchat. On October 2015, a video leaked online showed an early version of the new glasses, dubbed "Spectacles". Furthermore, news outlets reported employee hirings from companies such as from Microsoft, Nokia and Qualcomm and Snap Inc. CEO Evan Spiegel was seen wearing the prototype in public according to a report by Business Insider in June.
After Snapchat Inc.'s rebrand to Snap Inc. on September 24, 2016, the product was unveiled and announced on the same day. The product was released on November 10, 2016 when the first Snapbot, a proprietary vending machine for the smartglasses, was located near Snap's headquarters in Venice, Los Angeles.
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