Snapchat has expanded its horizons, having just patented a new and surprising product: Spectacles. These glasses will allow wearers to wirelessly send photos and video clips with just a tap of a button on the glasses' frame. In fact, the company expects the product to be so influential that they're changing the name of the company to simply Snap Inc because they've now gone beyond just application production.
Find out how this patent was obtained and the future implications the patent has for Snap's means of image production in general.
How are the Spectacles new and innovative smart eyewear?
While the smart eyewear market calls Google Glass to mind, Spectacles are quite different and much more likely to be successful.
The Spectacles are different from Google Glass in six main ways:
- Cheaper: Priced at US$129, they're much cheaper in comparison with Google Glass at US$1,500.
- Attractive design: Unlike Google Glass, the design is funky and comes in colours like teal and coral, or just chic black.
- Addresses security concerns: You can see when someone is recording. The button on the corner of the frame lights up.
- Cool charger: The sunglasses case is the charger!
- A single utility: Google Glass had many utilities whereas Spectacles just has one. Spectacles simply film a day's worth of Snaps.
- A new field of vision: Spectacles give a different vision to the user than conventional cameras. The Spectacles' camera is much closer to the human perspective because it has a 115 degree field of vision and it records in a circular frame. The circular vision, CEO Evan Spiegel explains, corrects an outdated form of rectangular images, which were created for the purposes of printing photos.
This patent could free Snap from relying on the smart phone
Not only are the Spectacles innovative in the smart eyewear market, but they could also have wider implications for the image production market at large.
Spectacles are innovative in the image production market at large.
CEO Evan Spiegel told the Wallstreet Journal that the Spectacles could be the start of freeing Snap from being so dependent on smart phones and thus be the first of many different means of image production to come.
The Spectacles truly are innovative, changing smart eyewear and the ways we see image production (both literally and figuratively). Consult with Alder IP's expert patent attorneys today to determine the patentability of your innovation that could be game changing in more than one way.