On Friday (June 22), Snap announced that its video-capturing Spectacles glasses can now export the videos they take in a bunch of formats, making it easier to share memories around the web.
With summer in full swing in many parts of the world—and July 4 festivities in the US right around the corner—now is a great time to have a powerful camera on you that’s as easy to use as wearing a pair of sunglasses.
That’s how Snap has been marketing the $150 version of Spectacles it launched in April. The ads have focused around summer fun, and recording the sorts of memories we make on vacations, beach trips, cookouts, parties, and the like. But up until now, the videos Spectacles captured were effectively trapped within Snapchat. You could save and export them to your phone’s camera roll, but they were oddly circular and didn’t make for great viewing outside the app.
But now Snap has introduced options to share Spectacles videos as widescreen or square videos right from the app, making them far easier to share and view elsewhere. Ironically, it makes it a lot easier to share content to Snapchat’s biggest rivals, Instagram and Facebook.
The new model of Spectacles are water-resistant, can capture HD videos, and can store around 150 clips. Effectively, they’re a GoPro camera that you can wear.
Sales of the original models were massively underwhelming and the new glasses probably won’t do much to help Snap stem its heavy losses. But who knows—perhaps Spectacles will become the hot new way to take Instagrams, and Snap can be saved by the popularity of its main competitor. But that seems as unlikely as an endless summer.