A snap too far? Snapchat rebrands to Snap Inc. and launches video camera sunglasses

Snapchat has renamed its company Snap Inc. and launched its first product, Spectacles, a pair of sunglasses with a built-in video camera.

The Snap Inc. homepage bills itself as a camera company and shows two icons, one for each of its brands: Snapchat and Spectacles. The app will still be called Snapchat, but the founders have given the company a new name and its own brand identity, using Snapchat’s yellow colour scheme, to represent the company’s wider endeavours.

Days after the rename, Snap Inc. has also launched Spectacles, its first foray into product design. The sunglasses have an integrated wireless video camera which records video in a circular format, with a 115 degree field of view, to capture “the human perspective”.

The glasses, which come in three colours, are “capable of storing a day’s worth of Snaps on a single charge,” says the brand, and connect directly to Snapchat via Bluetooth or Wifi, without the need to connect to a phone. Ten or 30 seconds of video is captured by tapping a button on the top left of the frames.

However after the much-hyped Google Glass came and went, the internet has had a mixed reaction to Spectacles, and their $130 price tag.