Are You Too Old For Spectacles?

One of the more interesting products to come out in wearables recently is the new Spectacles eye goggles from Snap Inc., the new name of the company that makes Snapchat, the video-based social media app most popular with those under 35 years old.

The Wall St. Journal published a detailed look at Snap’s new Spectacles as well as an interview with CEO Evan Spiegel on why he believes in this product and Snap’s future as a camera company. These new google-like specs have a camera in them that sees what you see and records that image in real time and stores it on your smartphone.

Many will compare this to Google Glass, the eyeglass-like display device that was sold for a little less than two years before Google ended production in 2015. I encourage you to resist the urge to compare the products. While a healthy bit of skepticism is warranted, Spectacles is quite different from Google Glass and, if anything, more similar to the GoPro line of cameras. It will also cost $130 instead of the $1500 Google Glass cost. Most importantly, in the eyes of their target demographic, Snapchat is much cooler than Google.

Reading the WSJ article, it was this bit from CEO Spiegel’s experience trying the prototype that stood out to me, when he used it while hiking with his fiancée:

“It was our first vacation, and we went to Big Sur for a day or two. We were walking through the woods, stepping over logs, looking up at the beautiful trees. And when I got the footage back and watched it, I could see my own memory, through my own eyes – it was unbelievable. It’s one thing to see images of an experience you had, but it’s another thing to have an experience of the experience. It was the closest I’d ever come to feeling like I was there again.”

Anyone who has used a GoPro understands the value of this statement. Lots of kids have GoPros, especially active ones. They use it to record themselves skateboarding, bike riding, hiking, skiing, snowboarding, swimming, etc. We may as well rename this generation “The Capture Generation,” because they capture all the things they do, say, or even think and share them in social media. That is the demographic Snap Inc. understands. These glasses are born out of millennial and Gen Z behavior with their devices, and their urge to capture and share, as you can clearly see from Spectacles introductory video:

With the first generation of any product, it is hard to make definitive claims regarding its future. You need to be very sold on Snap Inc. in order to buy their story about these glasses. That being said, the concept is sound and having capture devices on our person, on our eyes, makes sense at least for some day in the future. Even though the Chinese manufacturing ecosystem makes it easy for anyone to be in hardware, hardware will remain hard to do. Just because anyone can, doesn’t mean they should. If Snap Inc. can get the best hardware engineers out there (aside from the ones they have plucked from GoPro), then we can take them more seriously.

But I think that Snap’s Spectacles is not only for a younger generation. Indeed, it may strike a real chord with the 50+ crowd too. Many of us in this age group do a lot of leisure travel as part of our semi-retired or retired lifestyle. At the very least, most of us want to stay active and spend more time with family, as well as grandkids should we be so blessed.

These activities are ripe for creating memories and allowing us to capture them in real time and play them back or share them with family and friends. While most of the over 50+ crowd has not embraced GoPro, having that same feature in glasses that are less geeky and obtrusive makes them an ideal form factor for us to have a similar experience that a younger generation has with GoPro, but in a design that is very acceptable to all.

What I like most about this product idea and concept is that these glasses can always be ready to capture an experience, encounter, or event at the push of a button. Also, the price makes it accessible to just about anyone who would want one. And you can be assured that China Inc. will soon be doing similar glasses at much cheaper prices by early next year.

While this product was designed for a younger generation, I believe it will be a big hit with the over 50+  crowd; they will embrace Spectacles wholeheartedly and make it an important part of their visual computing capture experience.