Spectacles

New glasses that record what you see, whether or not you date a supermodel

What are they?

Sunglasses with a built-in video camera that lets wearers record clips of up to 30 seconds, which they can upload to the web via Wi-fi or Bluetooth. They cost $129.99 (around £100) and will probably be on sale in the US before Christmas.

Who’s making them?

It’s the first device from Snapchat ( www. snapchat.com), a hugely successful phone and tablet app that lets users send messages and videos that self-destruct after they’ve been opened. It’s very popular among young people, especially those who are romantically attached – or want to become so. Billions of videos are sent every month.

So anyone wearing Spectacles could film me?

So it seems, which raises serious privacy concerns. Snapchat says that a light will appear on the glasses to let others know that filming is taking place, but this is unlikely to appease those who found Google Glass intrusive.

Oh yes, Google Glass. Wasn’t that the same thing?

Pretty much. Google had high hopes for its video-recording specs, but when people started to wear them, mostly around Silicon Valley in California, they faced an unexpectedly harsh backlash from people worried they were being secretly filmed. In 2014, one woman wearing a pair of Google glasses even claimed that she had been attacked in a San Francisco bar.

So they flopped?

Massively. The price tag (a mere $1,500) also had something to do with it. In January 2015, a sheepish Google stopped selling the glasses, but last December it applied for a patent for a new version. We expect them to re-appear at some point.

Will Snapchat’s Spectacles prove more successful?

Probably. For a cutting-edge piece of technology they’ve very cheap, and they’re backed by some very trendy marketing (see main image and https:// spectacles.com). By contrast, Google’s doomed glasses were never considered cool, and people wearing them were branded “glassholes”. Snapchat’s Spectacles will be be aimed at the phone-addicted younger generation - just watch its video showing how skateboarding teenagers can use the specs to record their jumps: www.snipca.com/21948.

What if I’m not a skateboarding teenager?

Then you may have to find less thrillseeking uses. Plenty spring to mind: you could record your walk in the Lake District, for example, or a relaxing gondola trip down a Venice canal. Or perhaps you could use them while holidaying with a supermodel in California, as Evan Spiegel did.

Who’s he?

Snapchat’s 26-year-old creator, worth around $2bn. He spent some of that recently on a trip with his fiancee Miranda Kerr, an Australian supermodel. He recorded videos “walking through the woods… looking up at the beautiful trees”. Watching them later, he gushed: “I could see my own memory, through my own eyes”. Even allowing for Spiegel’s bias, one reason the videos look so good is because the lenses have an angle of 115 degrees, which mimics human eyesight. But to make the specs appeal to old as well as young, Snapchat must do two things: increase the recording time limit to five minutes (at least), and design a pair that look more sensible.

Will they become annoying in public?

There’s a real danger of that. If you think smartphone zombies are bad, imagine hordes of people wearing sunglasses filming everything they do. Spectacles could become a spectacular nuisance.