Smart wearable technology is very popular these days. Not only does everyone own a smartphone, but everyone has some sort of necklace, bracelet, or clothing item that connects to their mobile device to send data about their daily lives. The one thing, though, that hasn’t been successful in the wearable technology community is glasses. Google Glass came out a few years ago, and while a lot of people were excited about the prospect of what was going to come with it, the glasses never really took off. Snapchat Spectacles are hoping to bring attention back to smart glasses, but will it be successful?

About the Snapchat Spectacles

Snapchat creator Evan Spiegel built the Snapchat Spectacles as a way to allow for people to easily snap videos. The smart glasses will take 10 second videos and automatically upload them to your smartphone. According to Time, the glasses serve one purpose and they do it well which is what will make them work well. Rather than trying to offer a smart product that can do everything your smartphone does, it has just one function. The glasses would be useful in situations like at concerts where you would like to get a video of what you are watching but also prefer to just watch it at the same time.

Will they find more success than Google Glass?

One of the reasons Google Glass and other smart glasses have failed in the past is the fact that they are very ugly. People prefer not to wear glasses already, but add to the fact that the Google Glasses were large and bulky, and you can see why they were very undesirable. The Snapchat Spectacles look almost exactly like regular, stylish sunglasses, so you wouldn’t look weird wearing them in a crowd. Then consider they will be significantly cheaper than the Google Glasses, and suddenly you have a much more desirable product for the average consumer.

What about privacy?

The bigger problem, though, is that privacy laws make it hard to work with something like this where it might be impossible for someone to realize they are being recorded. Google glasses were banned from clubs and bars when they were released because of this issue, since most people don’t like being discreetly recorded. But if Spiegel can find a way around those laws or to work with the companies in making the glasses work, it might be very successful, especially among the Millennial crowd that likes pictures and videos of everything they do. Snapchat itself was something many people would not have thought was successful until it was, so we may just have to wait and see what happens with these glasses.

All we know for sure is that consumers want and need more wearable products they can work through their smartphones, so this is a step in the right direction.

Source: Time