Snapchat Releases First Hardware Product, Spectacles - WSJ: Why use a pair of video sunglasses—available this fall, by the way, one-size-fits-all in black, teal or coral—instead of holding up your smartphone like everyone else? Because, Spiegel says, the images that result are fundamentally different. Spectacles’ camera uses a 115-degree-angle lens, wider than a typical smartphone’s and much closer to the eyes’ natural field of view. The video it records is circular, more like human vision. (Spiegel argues that rectangles are an unnecessary vestige of printing photos on sheets of paper.) As you record, your hands are free to pet dogs, hug babies or flail around at a concert. You can reach your arms out to people you’re filming, instead of holding your phone up, as Spiegel describes it, “like a wall in front of your face.”
He remembers testing a prototype in early 2015 while hiking with his fianc�e, supermodel Miranda Kerr. “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.”
WHEN YOU ASK PEOPLE in the tech industry about Spiegel, and how it is that by age 26 he’s built a company with more than 1,000 employees and offices on three continents, one thing they often cite is Spiegel’s aptitude for product design. It’s what he studied at Stanford, before dropping out just shy of graduation to focus on Snapchat. It’s what makes his app so addictive that it now reaches more than 150 million daily users—nearly 15 million more than Twitter. It’s what attracts star talent like Imran Khan, whom Spiegel lured from Credit Suisse in 2014. “The reason I joined here was Evan,” says Khan, now chief strategy officer of Snap Inc., “because it was evident that he was the best product visionary I’d met in my entire life. And with technology companies, if you don’t have good product, you die.”
He remembers testing a prototype in early 2015 while hiking with his fianc�e, supermodel Miranda Kerr. “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.”
WHEN YOU ASK PEOPLE in the tech industry about Spiegel, and how it is that by age 26 he’s built a company with more than 1,000 employees and offices on three continents, one thing they often cite is Spiegel’s aptitude for product design. It’s what he studied at Stanford, before dropping out just shy of graduation to focus on Snapchat. It’s what makes his app so addictive that it now reaches more than 150 million daily users—nearly 15 million more than Twitter. It’s what attracts star talent like Imran Khan, whom Spiegel lured from Credit Suisse in 2014. “The reason I joined here was Evan,” says Khan, now chief strategy officer of Snap Inc., “because it was evident that he was the best product visionary I’d met in my entire life. And with technology companies, if you don’t have good product, you die.”