A digital summer

Yes­ter­day, we re­ceived the Snapchat glass­es, named sim­ply “Spec­ta­cles”. They’re bright­ly coloured sun­glass­es with se­mi-re­flec­tive lens­es that prac­ti­cal­ly scream for at­ten­tion. But their vi­su­al ap­pear­ance is sec­ondary. Or rather it’s the pri­ma­ry fea­ture but not for those view­ing the glass­es, rather for those wear­ing them. This is be­cause the Snapchat glass­es have an in­te­grat­ed cam­era – as you might guess – that al­lows you to record 10-sec­ond videos and share them via Snapchat.

We test­ed them in the of­fice to­day and shot a cou­ple of videos. The con­clu­sion? Kind of fun. And when we watched the clips back, we were left with the strange feel­ing that we were ac­tu­al­ly there. More so than when film­ing with our smart­phones. This is due to the nat­ur­al move­ments of our head, which we recog­nise when we watch the videos; every­thing ap­pears or­gan­ic and co­her­ent. Def­i­nite­ly an ex­cit­ing fea­ture, vague­ly rem­i­nis­cent of Google Glass, which didn’t re­al­ly catch on in the end. Per­haps this time? What’s cer­tain is that tech­nolo­gies that merge with hu­man sens­es will be all the more com­mon in the fu­ture. This de­vel­op­ment is un­stop­pable, as ev­i­denced by our ex­pe­ri­ence of Aug­ment­ed Re­al­i­ty. We should em­brace it straight away. And it’s al­so fun.

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