Snap’s Spectacles are weirdly inspiring

These camera glasses show there’s still room to think different

phone, they don’t see the whole circular video squashed onto their little screen. Instead, their screen shows a window into the circle, and if they rotate their phone, the section of the video they’re seeing changes along with it. So they can view it in landscape if they want, or just hold it in portrait. You can see how it works for yourself at spectacles.com.

Humans have been working in the same movie formats since its invention. We throw new tech at broadcasting video, but how many times have we changed the constraints of the medium itself? Snap’s circular video is more like an invitation to view your world, where the person watching has control over their perspective.

It makes us excited because, if we can still find new ways to innovate in 120-year-old technologies, just imagine what we’re yet to see from those invented in the last 30.

Snap, the company formerly known as Snapchat, often seems frivolous, making a product that not everyone “gets.” Its latest creation lives up to that: Spectacles. These are sunglasses with cameras built in, which can record 10-second clips when you press the button on them. The video is sent to your iPhone… and that’s about it. Snap is pitching them as a fun toy, rather than the herald of a new dawn of wearable technology. But of the many pieces of technology we’ve seen recently, we also think this is one of the best for showing that there’s still plenty of space left for innovation in even the oldest areas of tech.

What impresses us about Spectacles isn’t the hardware (though it’s very well done, with a case that charges the glasses between uses, much like Apple’s AirPods), but the video itself.

It’s round. The video taken by these glasses is not a traditional 16:9 rectangle, but circular. It seems bizarre at first, but it’s kind of brilliant when you look at the whole experience.

When you record on a phone, you can rotate it to best capture whatever you’re pointing at. When the camera is mounted on your head, you can’t. That’s where the circular video comes in. When you (or anyone else) is watching your video on their