Your future Snapchat photos and video could be captured completely hands-free, as the social media company announced Speculates today.
Speculates is Snapchat's first foray into hardware, and to no one's surprise, it's a camera. It records up to 10 seconds of video that can then be beamed to your phone, according to the Wall Street Journal.
There appear to be circular cameras near the right and left hinges of the sunglasses frames, and Snapchat says it uses wide 115-degree-angle lenses and, uniquely, outputs circular video.
The brand new product's first-person video recordings, initiated by tapping the sunglasses hinge, further cement Snapchat as a way to tell daily stories that expire after 24 hours.
How it's different from Google Glass
Snapchat Speculates will immediately draw comparisons to Google Glass, a product we covered extensively at TechRadar over the last four years.
However, this young social media network is in a better position to make a stylish, less controversial wearable camera. It comes in colors of black, teal and coral.
Embedding a Snap camera in sunglasses makes Speculates fundamentally different than Google's cyborg-looking head-mounted computer. It's a lot less off putting.
The sunglasses also appear to light up when in active recording mode, according a leak earlier today. That was Google's missing feature that caused people to worry about stealth Glass recordings.
Price and release date
Snapchat Speculates is slated to become available this autumn with one-size-fits-all shades. However, the report says it's intended for limited distribution.
That likely means Speculates is being beta tested in order to both gauge user interest and experiment with launching a hardware product. Snapchat is a software company, and a rather new one at that.
The good news is that when these phone-free sunglasses are sold, they'll only cost $129 (about £99, AU$168), another big way they'll be dramatically different from Google Glass.
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