Snapchat's Spectacles are here, but they are not so easy to find. The new wearable device is only available in certain vending machines that are popping up randomly across the United States. It captures video and sends it automatically to your Snapchat app. Our friends at Cheddar loaned us a pair to try out. Here's what it's like.

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Snapchat is partnering with location intelligence company Foursquare to provide marketers with more highly-targeted location-based data for geofilters (animated overlays on pictures or video), according to AdWeek.

While Snapchat launched geofilters a year ago, the Foursquare deal will give Snapchat advertisers access to over 90 million locations for campaigns. The pinpoint accuracy of Foursquare data will allow advertisers to accurately target highly precise location parameters, even at the the storefront level. The new deal has several implications for Foursquare, Snapchat and the location-based ad market:   

• Data is becoming a key asset for Foursquare. Since data is collected directly from a user’s smartphone, it tends to be highly precise, and the company has signed on other companies like Apple, Pinterest, Twitter and Uber. Foursquare has already proven the validity of its data by accurately forecasting iPhone 6s sales last year, and Chipotle’s 30% year-over-year decline in same-store-sales in Q1 2016.
• Snapchat is inching closer to offline attribution. Foursquare’s campaign data bridges the gap for offline attribution as in-store sales can potentially be matched to user’s snapping in the store. Foursquare launched offline attribution tools early this year and has been a major focus for the company.
• Snapchat can sell more filters while enhancing the user experience. Reducing the square footage of geofilter boundaries will increase Snapchat’s overall ad load. In addition, users will be exposed to more filters, which could boost engagement with the app. Snapchat could borrow from Pokémon Go’s playbook and encourage users to collect or share rare geofilters. Parent company Snap is already playing with the scarcity strategy by constantly relocating the vending machine through which it's selling its Spectacles device each day.
• Local advertising may get more creative. Google, Yelp, and Facebook all want to get into the local advertising market. However, these ad units are often searchable indexes with display ads running at the top of results, or overlapped on a map (Google promoted pins). Hyper-local Snapchat geofilters provide an alternative creative format to the local ad market, albeit with a niche audience of young folks.  

Foursquare is one of 11 data and measurement companies that Snapchat partners with, and it's willing to work with others to complement data sets and add value to geofilters. Similarly, Uber partners with Foursquare, Google Maps, and Tom Tom to add value to the ride-sharing platform.

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Snapchat's new camera-equipped glasses have started popping up for sale in locations around the country, dispensing from vending machines for a few hundred lucky people.

The glasses — called Spectacles — have only been sold in three locations: Venice Beach, Big Sur, and Tulsa, Oklahoma. So far, Business Insider hasn't been able to buy a pair yet but thankfully, our friends over at Cheddar were willing to lend us theirs. 

As we tried them out in our offices, one question kept coming up: How do I get this to work with my phone?

Luckily, Snapchat made it pretty easy to pair the Spectacles with your phone, but it does take a few minutes to figure it out. 

Here's how to get the Spectacles working so you can start snapping away.

SEE ALSO: Here are all the places Snapchat’s glasses have been sold — and where they could pop up next

First, make sure Bluetooth is turned on. You can do that on iPhone by swiping up from the bottom of the screen and pressing the middle button in the top row. It will turn blue when it's enabled.

Next, make sure your Snapchat app is up-to-date, then open the app. This is what the main screen will look like when you open it up. At the top of your screen should be a small ghost icon — click it.

This screen will come up next, which shows your Snapcode. The Snapcode is scannable.

Regardless of how you feel about Snapchat's new camera-equipped glasses, one thing is certain: Snapchat's marketing team is genius.

The glasses, called Spectacles, are exclusive, hard to come by, and one of the most innovative products of the year. So of course, we all have to have them.

But since Snapchat — which recently renamed itself to Snap Inc. — has only been selling them in obscure locations, Business Insider is just now getting our hands on a pair, thanks to our good friends at Cheddar, who kindly lent us theirs.

My first reaction? Wow.

From the first moment of opening the lid to pairing the Spectacles with my phone, they were everything I hoped they'd be: well-designed, stylish, fun, and easy to use. Walking around New York City with them, I felt like part of an exclusive club, and was simultaneously worried someone would snatch them off my face.

For the company's first hardware product, the glasses, which cost $130 and are only sold out of vending machines, can certifiably be called a hit.

But there's one problem with the Spectacles: the novelty wears off quickly.

Subtle and stylish

Arguably the best part about the Spectacles is that they're subtle. We tested out a black pair and they look just like regular sunglasses at first glance. Walking down the street in them, I didn't feel like I was wearing a nerdy tech product on my face.

The only ways you can tell that there's something different about the glasses are the yellow circles around the lens and the light on either side of the frame, and the fact that the hinges are quite thick — that's where the charging port is and where all the technology is housed.

While the teal and coral versions of the Spectacles look more like toys or gadgets, the black pair is by far the most subtle of the three shades.

And although some people — men especially — complained about the fit of the Spectacles, they fit comfortably on the bridge of my nose. There are two rubber pads on either side of the nose bridge that help them fit snugly, and the shape of the frames complemented most face shapes. In fact, they looked good on nearly everyone who tried them on. Clearly, Snap paid close attention to trends in glasses and sunglasses and chose a shape that probably won't go out of style anytime soon, but still looks modern.

Oddly, Snap doesn't say anywhere on the Spectacles website whether the glasses offer 100% UVA and UVB protection, as most sunglasses do.

Video capture made easy — some of the time

Spectacles come in a plastic tube that houses the case, the glasses, and the other accessories, including a ghost-shaped cleaning cloth and a charging cable. While the case is a bit bulky — it's prism-shaped, so it doesn't fit in pockets or small purses — it's a clever design that charges the glasses when they're snapped into place.

Setting up the glasses to work with your phone is easy and straightforward, and Snapchat includes step-by-step instructions inside the package (for more on how to set them up, click here). Once they're paired with your phone, you can begin shooting videos that will upload directly to your phone and are housed inside the Memories folders.

It took me a little while to adjust to shooting video with the glasses. I spent years shooting video on DSLRs and I now constantly shoot video on my iPhone, but this is a totally new and mostly incomparable experience — the glasses are literally seeing what you're seeing.

The most challenging part of recording video was how easily the lens could be obstructed. Being outside on a windy day caused strands of my hair to fly in front of the lens, ruining a perfectly nice video of the Flatiron Building. And since you can only guess at whether the glasses are still recording — you can kind of see the light flashing out of the corner of your eye — I often would take them off too soon and accidentally cover the lens with my hand. 

This is all part of a larger problem with the Spectacles: You can't see what you're recording in real time.

With basically any other camera, you can watch the video as you're recording it, ensuring that you're capturing what you intend to. But with Spectacles, it's basically a guess. Because the lens has a fish-eye effect, it was hard to tell what would be in the frame and what would get cut off. While it might somewhat defeat the purpose of the Spectacles, I would have loved if I could watch my videos in real-time on my phone screen. 

And if you were hoping to record video with the Spectacles at nighttime, good luck: While Snap hasn't released the specs of the camera, the lens does not perform well in low-light scenarios. 

A clunky app experience

There's one other major problem with Spectacles: It's actually a hassle to view the videos after they're done recording. While the shooting part is easy, the entire experience after the fact is clunky and time-consuming.

The videos are buried in your Memories folder, which most people likely never even open but was clearly created to house Spectacles videos. You have to watch through every single video in order, so you can't just select your most recent video and look at it — all the videos you've created play back much like a Snap story.

You can speed things along by clicking the button that says "Edit & Send," which shifts the videos into a carousel view that you can scroll though, but it still puts them in chronological order. Anyone trying to view a specific shot will quickly be frustrated by how long it takes to get to your most recent video.

But there's one feature of Spectacles that arguably makes it one of the coolest products I've used in a while: When you play back the video, it shifts around when you move your phone, much like 360 video. You can look around the entire image of what the Spectacles just by turning your phone. When you add a caption and upload the video to you Snapstory, the caption moves along with the video. That feature alone makes filming videos with the Spectacles incredibly fun to use.

My first instinct was to use the Spectacles to shoot beautiful, first-person videos, but it was clear very quickly that this product is not designed to do that. In trying to shoot a nice video walking up to the Chrysler Building at night, I realized after playing it back that it pretty much just looked like I had shot it with my phone. 

The Spectacles seem designed for experiences where there's a lot of movement and a lot to look at — an experience that's best represented POV-style. When I started really testing out the glasses, I felt like they were wasted on my jaunts around New York City. The glasses would be better put to use in situations like concerts, big parties, sporting events, or anything outdoors — which means that if you're buying them for everyday use, you might be disappointed. 

The other downside is the videos don't upload to your phone in HD. Instead, you get a somewhat blurry SD version first, and can opt to upload the HD videos after. But that requires connecting to the WiFi inside the Spectacles, which again is a clunky and time-consuming process, and it's difficult to select an individual video to upload in HD. 

Conclusion

For Snap's first iteration of the glasses, they're a total success — as long as you're not looking at them as a tech product. 

If you think about the Spectacles as a fashion product that happens to be tech-enabled, they're fantastic: They look good, it's easy to record video, and they're fun to use. Owning them puts you in an exclusive club, but not in the same vein as the Silicon Valley techies who flocked around Google Glass. 

Instead, the Spectacles are aimed at a different crowd: Snapchat users who want to take their game to the next level; people who travel and explore and don't want to do so with a GoPro strapped to their heads; and millennials who are eager to be inspired by a tech product again and want to be the first to own the next big thing — in essence, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel himself. 

Are the glasses perfect? Not even close. The app's capabilities haven't caught up to what the Spectacles are trying to accomplish, the camera is below-average, and after only a few hours of using them, the novelty completely wore off. Right now, their allure mostly lies in how difficult they are to obtain, evidenced by the fact that everyone at Business Insider and all of my friends who tried them on immediately uploaded a selfie while wearing them, but didn't actually record any video with them. 

For $130, the product seems worth the money, and would be fun to have on-hand for the few days a year you're at a music festival or taking a road trip with friends. But don't be surprised if, after a few selfies and a couple fun POV videos, your Spectacles start to gather dust.

SEE ALSO: Here's how to pair Snapchat Spectacles with your phone

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NOW WATCH: We got our hands on Snapchat's Spectacles — here's what they're like

Snapchat's Spectacles may be hard to come by, but we got ahold of a pair to see how they work. Tech Reporter Avery Hartmans shares her thoughts on the popular wearable device, which lets you record video, hands-free, and have it upload directly to your Snapchat app. 

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Snap is hot. The California-based company continues to evolve Snapchat, an app that continues to be one of the few genuine smashes from a company that isn’t Facebook or Google. It’s just launched its first hardware product, Spectacles, whose rollout has been widely praised as inventive.

On Tuesday, reports emerged that it had filed for its much-anticipated IPO, which could value the young company as high as $25 billion. That’d be the biggest tech IPOs in recent memory.

Going public brings renewed scrutiny, however, and some have questioned whether or not Snap — which may or may not be profitable — can significantly grow beyond teens and young adults.

As this chart from Statista shows, there’s some validity to that concern. While Snapchat is approaching Facebook levels of popularity among young smartphone owners in the US, its usage has traditionally dropped a cliff as you go up in age.

That said, those figures are growing, the company is diversifying, and the many young people who use Snapchat are really into it. Maybe $25 billion won’t seem so crazy in a few years. Or maybe it’ll go the way of Twitter.

SEE ALSO: There’d be a lot of tech industry money at stake in a Trump trade war with China

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NOW WATCH: The ‘Apple of China’ just unveiled a phone that’s more powerful and better looking than the iPhone

If you want Snapchat's $129 Spectacles, you have to be in the right place at the right time: They're only being sold out of "Snapbots," Snapchat's very cute vending machines, from seemingly random locations all over the country.

Here's a Snapbot:

Unless you've been in Venice or Big Sur in California or Caloosa, Oklahoma, right when the Snapbots appear, or you're willing to pony up hundreds above the asking price on eBay, it's literally impossible to get Spectacles.

That hype seems to be driving people in San Francisco, usually the first ones to get any kind of cool new tech, slightly insane. 

Enter Pablo Rochat, a self-described "award-losing creative" in the tech industry. He took it upon himself to bring San Francisco its own Snapbot...sort of.

Check it out:

Wait...something's not quite right here.

Rochat says his porta-potty faux Snapbot briefly resided in San Francisco's Marina neighborhood before he erased the paint.

Rochat is a bit of a prankster in general: He describes his latest major project, "Pee World VR," thusly: "Peeing in bathrooms is boring. We solved this problem by creating a VR app that lets you pee virtually anywhere."

SEE ALSO: REVIEW: Snapchat's Spectacles live up to the hype, but have a ways to go

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NOW WATCH: First thoughts on Snapchat's Spectacles — the sunglasses everyone is going crazy for

Facebook on Wednesday acquired face recognition technology provider FacioMetrics in a move to beef up its photo and video capabilities. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

A spin-off from Carnegie Mellon University in 2015 as a response to market demand surrounding use of facial image analysis, FacioMetrics is the producer of developer tools for understanding facial behavior and demographic from videos, detection, and even letting you swap faces. It appears that all of its apps have been removed from both the App Store and Google Play store.

Companies that used FacioMetrics’ technology include those in the academic and industry world, such as Lightricks, Anki, Meograph, University of Kentucky, Carnegie Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a “leading social networking company” — perhaps Facebook?

“How people share and communicate is changing and things like masks and other effects allow people to express themselves in fun and creative ways,” remarked a Facebook spokesperson in a statement. “We’re excited to welcome the Faciometrics team who will help bring more fun effects to photos and videos and build even more engaging sharing experiences on Facebook.”

The purchase of FacioMetrics comes weeks after Facebook demonstrated Prisma-like filters for its live video product. At this year’s WSJD Live conference, chief product officer Chris Cox showcased a new app which would let you transfer the style of an artist, such as Rembrandt onto your image using Convolutional Neural Network and computer vision. It also isn’t the social networking company’s first foray into the image recognition space.

Cox explained that real-time implementation was the hardest challenge the company faced, as the program functions at 24 frames per second. “It’s taking something that’s a known technology, but it was getting it to be fast on a phone and to be able to be done at a low-enough latency, without dropping frames, stuttering, or…blurring.” The app is still in its prototyping phase, but there’s certainly an advantage to get these augmented reality filters up and running sooner than later.

The battle for influencers and content creators around live video is heating up and while giving people the ability to livestream is one thing, empowering them to own the experience is another. And it’s here where FacioMetrics could play an important role.

Certainly this is impactful for Facebook, especially around its Oculus VR division and will pair well with technology gleaned through its Face.com purchase in 2012. With Oculus, FacioMetrics’ technology could assist developers in developing more realistic-like experiences so avatars appear and respond more like the user.

Here’s FacioMetrics’ announcement of the acquisition by its chief executive Fernando De La Torre:

We started FacioMetrics to respond to the increasing interest and demand for facial image analysis – with all kinds of applications including augmented/virtual reality, animation, audience reaction measurement, and others. We began our research at Carnegie Mellon University developing state-of-the-art computer vision and machine learning algorithms for facial image analysis. Over time, we have successfully developed and integrated this cutting-edge technology into battery-friendly and efficient mobile applications, and also created new applications of this technology.

Now, we’re taking a big step forward by joining the team at Facebook, where we’ll be able to advance our work at an incredible scale, reaching people from across the globe. We are thrilled for our next big step forward by joining Facebook. We’d like to thank Carnegie Mellon University and our clients for their trust and support – we couldn’t have made it this far without them.

We are looking forward to getting started at Facebook!

SEE ALSO: Facebook is finally getting serious about its ‘Snapchat problem’

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NOW WATCH: A Facebook bug was telling people they died

Snapchat's new camera-equipped glasses are officially the hottest, hardest-to-get tech product of the year. 

The Snapbot vending machine that dispenses the glasses showed up in Santa Monica on Thursday morning and the line to buy them quickly grew incredibly wrong. 

Here's a look at the queue, thanks to a video tweeted out by Los Angeles-based web developer Scott Buscemi:

And here's what the scene looks like from above, thanks to a drone video:

The Spectacles website isn't showing the bot in Santa Monica anymore, which may mean the Snapbot quickly ran out of glasses. It's not clear when or how Snapchat, which recently changed its corporate name to Snap, plans to make the glasses more broadly available.  Here's a rundown of the vending machine's road trip across the US so far. 

SEE ALSO: REVIEW: Snapchat's Spectacles live up to the hype, but have a ways to go

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Robert Scoble has done it again. 

The super-enthusiastic tech pundit is infamous for a 2013 photo of himself wearing Google Glass in the shower. In it, Scoble looks like he's red-faced screaming in joy at the camera while still wet and naked in the shower.

Google killed the consumer version of Google Glass two years later in the wake of problems with battery life, privacy concerns and the product's reputation for being geeky and generally uncool. It's hard to know how much the shower picture contributed to the perception, but it certainly didn't help. Even Google's founder, Larry Page, told Scoble that he "didn't appreciate" the shower selfie. 

When Snapchat unveiled its new Spectacles camera glasses this month, the company went out of its way to avoid the Google Glass image problem, targeting the sunglasses to non-techie crowds and playing up the cool factor.

Well, Snapchat PR's worst nightmare has just come true, and Scoble is back in the shower. 

The tech blogger posted a picture of himself in the shower on Thursday, defiantly sticking his tongue out. To be fair, Scoble looks better in this picture: He appears to have gotten a new hairdo, he's upgraded the tiles in his shower and he's not all wet. 

Or perhaps, to Snapchat's credit, the glasses make all the difference. 

SEE ALSO: This is what it's like to buy Snapchat's new Spectacles glasses

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NOW WATCH: First thoughts on Snapchat's Spectacles — the sunglasses everyone is going crazy for

There's a lot of hype around Snapchat's new Spectacles, a pair of smart glasses that records the world from your point of view. 

A lot of the buzz has been because they're so hard to get. So far, Snapchat has only sold a few hundred from a traveling vending machine that pops up in different locations around the US.  

If you want to get your hands on a pair of the sleek sunglasses, here are three options for how to do it:

SEE ALSO: REVIEW: Snapchat's Spectacles live up to the hype, but have a ways to go

Chase the Snapbot around the country.

This is the cheapest way to pick up a pair, but by far the hardest. 

Snapchat's parent company, Snap Inc., is only selling pairs through a machine called the Snapbot. 

The vending machine is placed in a new location about every 48 hours. A countdown will start on the Spectacles website 24 hours before the location is unveiled and there's no clues before then as to where it will drop.

So far, the Snapbot has made surprise appearances during the last week in Venice Beach, California; Big Sur, California; Catoosa, Oklahoma; and Santa Monica, California. 

You're likely to be guessing blindly at where it will be, so keep an eye on its map as the countdown clock hits zero in case it winds up somewhere near you.

Pay up on eBay.

Spectacles are a hot item eBay with many bids going into the high hundreds of dollars. If you want to just buy a pair now, the prices range from $900 to $4,500 for sealed and unsealed containers. 

One thing to note: Snap Inc. can't guarantee the authenticity of any pairs purchased outside a Snapbot, so be wary purchasing from a third party.

Rent one from companies like Lumoid or Joymode for a few days.

While it's not quite the same as owning, if you're really looking to experience Spectacles early, try renting a pair. 

Gear rental companies like Lumoid and Joymode have already managed to snag a few pairs to rent out to people.

On Lumoid, the glasses require a deposit and rentals start at $60 for a minimum of three days. They can be shipped anywhere in the US, including Alaska and Hawaii, and come with a pre-paid return shipping label so you can drop them back in the mail when you're done.

Over on Joymode, the renal is slightly cheaper at $40 and up to four days, but it's restricted to people in the Los Angeles area. (See this map for details.) The company brings the Spectacles to you and picks them up, so there's no shipping involved. The waitlist is already "hundreds" long, the company says — but you can move up the waitlist faster if you follow Joymode on social media and invite friends to the service.

Black Friday, the start to the holiday shopping season, takes place in a week.

Stores are already starting to offer deals on TVs, Amazon Echo speakers, Sony PlayStations, iPads, and other electronics that kids of all ages would want to see underneath the Christmas tree.

But the most desirable gadgets this Christmas won't be easy to get.

They probably won't be available in stores, unless you line up in the early hours of the morning.

This season, some of the most interesting electronics — from companies like Nintendo and Apple — will be incredibly hard to buy, in short supply, and will require queueing up, or getting into an Ebay bidding war, or knowing someone who works for Apple.

Here are the three rarest electronics gadgets that you probably won't be able to find this Christmas: 

SEE ALSO: Nintendo just released a brand-new $60 game system — here's what we know

Snapchat Spectacles

Retail price: $129

Ebay price: $600+

Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, started to roll out its new face computer earlier this month.

The Spectacles are super fun. They're well-designed, stylish, and because they're so rare, they attract attention. A camera mounted on the sunglasses takes short videos from a first-person view that will certainly get attention on Snapchat. 

They're also very hard to get a hold of. Snap is only selling them through a single vending machine that it moves to a random location every other day. 

The vending machine spits out about 300 pairs per day, we've guessed, so there are perhaps only about 1000 pairs of Spectacles out in the world. 

The vending machine has made appearances in LA and Tulsa, Oklahoma. 

They retail for $129, but you can get a pair on Ebay for about $600 or more.

Apple AirPods

Retail price: $159

Ebay price: Not available

The perfect gift to give alongside a headphone-jack free iPhone 7 will be hard to find this season.

In September, Apple debuted AirPods, a new set of wireless earbuds that pair instantaneously with Apple products and look like an iconic pair of the Apple EarPods with their cords cut off.

They were supposed to go on sale in October, but Apple delayed them, saying that they weren't ready, and hasn't set an official release date for them.

The latest word suggests that mass production will start in December, which means that they might not go on sale before Christmas. Even if they do go on sale, it's a safe assumption that they will be in short supply, so if you want a pair, you'll have to try to buy them as soon as they go on sale or line up outside of an Apple Store. 

Some people already have AirPods — analysts and journalists have them so they can review them, and we've spotted Apple employees rocking them in San Francisco. 

When they do go on sale, they will cost $159 from Apple. There don't seem to be any AirPods for immediate shipping available on Ebay. 

Nintendo NES Classic Edition

Retail price: $60

Ebay price: $200+

A great gift for Nintendo fans is the NES Classic Edition. It might just be a perfect gift for adults who want to replay the classic games they played as children. 

Maybe nostalgia is the reason that people on Ebay are paying $200 or more for the $60 console, which is hard to find. 

The pocket-sized NES is basically a modern computer that does nothing but emulate and look like the original Nintendo Entertainment System, which first launched in 1985. But it plugs in to your flatscreen with HDMI. 

It can play 30 classic NES games, including "Final Fantasy," all three "Super Mario Bros.," and the "Legend of Zelda." It even comes with a cute modern version of the classic NES controller.

When a batch of NES Classics went on sale on Amazon earlier this month, the demand crashed the product page.

If you'd like to get your hands on one at its retail price, online retailers like Walmart and Amazon are announcing occasional supply drops — log on at the appropriate time, usually 5 p.m. ET, get your refresh clicker finger on the ready, and hope you get lucky. 

Apple CEO Tim Cook has said several times in the last year that his company is willing to look at and consider billion-dollar acquisitions with its $237 billion war chest.

Most of the possibilities floated by analysts and the press don't make a lot of sense: Time Warner, Disney, Tesla Motors.

Some are saying Apple needs to think differently, and make one big, crazy acquisition, before it's too late. An acquisition that would change the company forever.

I think Apple should buy Snap, Snapchat's parent company. 

The timing is now

Why would Snap founder Evan Spiegel want to sell his company to Apple? Money. 

Snap filed for a confidential IPO earlier this week, Business Insider learned, that could value the company between $20 billion and $25 billion. The actual paperwork, including Snap's revenue, profit (or lack thereof), and assets has yet to surface. 

But the fact that Snap filed confidentially reveals one fact: Snap's revenue is less than $1 billion. Even assuming big league revenue growth for the disappearing photo messenger, that's a surprisingly large valuation. 

That doesn't matter to Apple, and the company could afford a nice premium over the $25 billion the public market could value Snap at. Apple could afford Snap even if it were valued at $50 billion. 

Spiegel has expressed doubt that advertising is the growth engine that will propel Snap to become a massive technology company. "Feed based advertising units will plummet in value ... similar to earlier devaluing of Internet display advertising," he wrote in an email stolen during the Sony hack. 

If Snapchat's advertising strategy doesn't work out, it could destroy much of the worth currently locked into Snap shares held by Spiegel and other founders.

That's why Spiegel seems to be pivoting his company towards becoming a hardware provider, even going so far as to call Snap a "camera company" on its own website. It's also why Snap has started to sell Spectacles, a surprising new product that combines stylish sunglasses with a camera. 

There's no company that understands making and selling premium hardware better than Apple. 

First glass

The hype around Spectacles, Snapchat's first real hardware product, reminds me of the hype that used to surround Apple product launches. 

Every time Snap's custom-built, Minion-looking vending machine touches down somewhere — three times in California so far, and once in Oklahoma — a line immediately forms, full of people waiting to buy the $129 glasses. 

Apple used to have a following like that, and to some extent still does, but there is an excitement to the Spectacles launch that Apple has not had in a long time.

Just look at the lines.

That's because Spiegel carefully planned this launch. He understands the importance of marketing, and limited rollouts, and how important it is to make something cool that people want. 

And that's the key — Spectacles are the first piece of tech worn on the face that is actually cool. 

"From the first moment of opening the lid to pairing the Spectacles with my phone, they were everything I hoped they'd be: well-designed, stylish, fun, and easy to use. Walking around New York City with them, I felt like part of an exclusive club,"my colleague Avery Hartmans wrote earlier this week.

"Regardless of how you feel about Snapchat's new camera-equipped glasses, one thing is certain: Snapchat's marketing team is genius," she wrote. 

News broke this week that Apple is working on a pair of stylish smart glasses that could launch as soon as 2018. It's still early, but it seems like Snap has already solved the biggest problem with wearable computers on the face: getting people to want to wear them.

Snapchat's glasses are only a camera for now, but it's not hard to see where the company is going with them — a fully functional AR device that could be competing with Apple Glasses in a few years. 

Apple could eliminate a major competitor and gain a great head start to its glasses project at the same time.

Why Apple would want Snap 

The fact that Snap doesn't have much revenue yet actually makes the company attractive to Apple. 

Cook says all the time that Apple doesn't buy companies for their cash flow — Apple has plenty of that itself.

Instead, Cook says, Apple is looking for "great talent and great intellectual property." Snap has both. 

Snap is growing quickly and now has a varied and eclectic pool of talented engineers, especially in the fields of computer vision and AI, two fields which Apple is investing heavily in. 

Some of Snap's top employees even used to work at Apple.

Snap also has some great intellectual property. People in the augmented reality industry say its in-house developed emoji tracking feature is genuinely impressive, and could be a building block for future applications. Snap's face-transforming Snapchat "Lens" filters are probably the most widely used example of computer vision-powered augmented reality at the moment.

That's pretty attractive intellectual property for a company that is is getting into augmented reality in a big way. Plus, it's undeniable that Snap is tapped into young people in a way that Apple, led by its team of mostly older men, is not.  

Plus, Apple is reportedly developing a Snapchat-like video app. Why clone, when you can have the original? 

Spiegel might not sell — but he does emulate Apple founder Steve Jobs

There are a few issues with this proposal. First, Snap is an LA-based company, so Apple couldn't buy it with overseas cash at a discount — one of the main factors driving the company's M&A strategy at the moment. 

But the bigger problem is that Spiegel probably doesn't want to sell.

He famously turned down an offer from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to buy his company for billions of dollars in 2013. (He also previously blew off Zuck with a surprisingly cold email.) 

If Speigel, who is 26, sold Snap to Apple, Apple should make him the CEO. After all, Apple has had a 26-year old CEO before: Steve Jobs. 

The key to Spiegel is that he is a product "Picasso," as people who know him have said. He studied product design at Stanford, and Business Insider has been told that Snap's office vibe is like "a movie director starting a company, with artists flowing in and out"— similar to how Apple's famously secretive industrial design studio operates. 

Apple would do well with a product-focused guru at its helm. Cook is fantastic at running the company, but Apple was built around the whims and taste of one man — Jobs — who was intensely focused on building products.

Today, with chief design officer Jony Ive increasingly looking backwards and working on side projects, there's a sense that there isn't anyone at Apple who's in charge of the product anymore. 

Speigel — who resembles Steve Jobs in his showmanship, his obsession with secrecy, and his focus on products and experience — would be able to give Apple some clarity when it comes to its AR and glasses strategy, and probably has an idea or two about how to make the next iPhone better beyond giving it faster chips and taking away the headphone jack. 

But Apple should hurry. Snap could list as soon as March — and in a few years, it could be one of Apple's fiercest competitors. 

SEE ALSO: REVIEW: Snapchat's Spectacles

AND: Tim Cook laid out the playbook for Apple's next big thing

CAN'T MISS: If you think it's crazy that Snapchat might go public at a $40 billion valuation, here's something to consider

AND: Meet the power players who run Snapchat

DON'T MISS: Apple has a secret team working to make the iPhone's camera a portal to augmented reality

PLUS: What it’s like to work at Snapchat, one of the most secretive companies in tech

Join the conversation about this story »

Snapchat's Spectacles are on sale in New York City.

The city was announced Monday as the newest location for one of Snap Inc.'s quirky vending machines — still the only way you can officially buy the sunglass-mounted cameras.

The latest vending machine is located inside a pop-up shop at 5 East 59th Street, near Central Park in Manhattan.

That location is scheduled to remain open until New Year's Eve but will be closed on Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, and Christmas Day.

Spectacles sync with your Snapchat account on your phone, letting you record short videos and send them to the ephemeral messaging app.

My colleague Avery Hartmans got her hands on a pair of Spectacles in November. Her verdict: They're great.

"For Snap's first iteration of the glasses, they're a total success — as long as you're not looking at them as a tech product," she wrote.

"If you think about the Spectacles as a fashion product that happens to be tech-enabled, they're fantastic: They look good, it's easy to record video, and they're fun to use. Owning them puts you in an exclusive club, but not in the same vein as the Silicon Valley techies who flocked around Google Glass."

Snap Inc., the parent company of Snapchat, is using quirky "bot" vending machines to sell Spectacles — keeping them exclusive and generating hype while avoiding the dreadful "techie" reputation that beset Google's failed Google Glass headset back in 2013.

Spectacles cost $130 a pop from the vending machine — but people are reselling them online for far, far more. They're available in teal, orange, or black, and you can buy a maximum of two pairs at a time.

If you're planning to buy them in NYC, be aware that some customers are having trouble with their banks flagging the transaction as fraudulent activity, because the macine is "based" in California. Snapchat employees are recommending customers call their banks ahead of time, before attempting to buy them, according to Mashable's Kerry Flynn.

Still unsure of where to find Spectacles in New York? Here's a map, courtesy of Snap, of where the store is located.

In a not-so-subtle dig at Apple, the pop-up store is located right across from the company's Fifth Avenue Apple Store.

And here's how it looks inside. The lone vending machine sits at the end of a queue, while videos play on the walls.

Don't expect to stroll right in off the street and pick up a pair, though. As of about 6:30 a.m. ET, dozens of people were already lining up to get a pair.

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Snapchat's new $130 camera glasses, Spectacles, are in really limited supply. They're only being sold through a single vending machine that pops up in weird places, like the Grand Canyon. 

The scavenger hunt can be fun, but it can be frustrating to children, who might have to endure long drives or trips only to find out that Snap, Snapchat's parent company, has sold out of the glasses for the day. 

That's exactly what happened to Las Vegas-based marketer Sarah Evans, who drove five hours with her two kids, and spent $1000 in helicopter tickets, only to find out that she could not get a pair of the fun toy glasses while they were being sold at the Grand Canyon. 

That's a bummer. It's hard when you can't get something you want really bad.

Luckily, Snap came to the rescue, according to Evans, after she used her social media platform to get in touch with the company's head of marketing. The company surprised her and her two children with several pairs of Spectacles.

Watch how happy this kid is to get Spectacles — his mom might even be happier.

If you want a pair of Spectacles, you or your children need to be at least 13 to use them. You could buy them on Ebay, and they will also be sold at a pop-up store in New York until 2017.

SEE ALSO: The 3 gadgets that will be hardest to find this holiday season

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Instagram announced two new features on Monday: Snapchat-like disappearing messages and the ability to broadcast live video.

Both features announced Monday are intended "to give people the flexibility to capture and share all their moments in a fun, low-pressure way," according to an Instagram spokesperson.

They also come after a slew of recent Instagram updates designed to win over Snapchat's more than 150 million users.

Instagram is now copying the basic concept of Snapchat's messaging. Photo and video messages sent directly to other Instagram users will disappear immediately after they're viewed, like Snapchat. You'll also be notified when the person you're messaging takes a screenshot, like Snapchat.

Where Instagram differs from Snapchat is that you can message multiple people at once.

Instagram is taking a different approach to live video (which Snapchat hasn't introduced) by immediately deleting each broadcast once it's completed. The app's algorithms will notify the people you interact with the most when you go live and show popular broadcasts as they're happening in the Explore section.

Disappearing messages are rolling out to all Instagram users starting Monday, while live video is being tested with a small percentage of users before being made available more broadly.

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As Snapchat's new camera-equipped glasses travel to more cities around the US, more of us are able to get our hands on them.

The glasses — called Spectacles — can be a lot of fun. They're easy to pair with your phone, record fish-eye video of what you're seeing, and look a whole lot better on your face than Google Glass ever did.

Plus, they're one of the most in-demand tech products of the year, so using them feels as though you've joined an exclusive club.

But the first foray into hardware for Snap — Snapchat's parent company — isn't perfect. In fact, there are some problems with the glasses that made using them something of an annoyance or even downright difficult.

Here are some of the biggest problems that came up when I tested them:

SEE ALSO: Here's how to pair Snapchat Spectacles with your phone

1. The lens is easily obstructed

Lens obstruction was the biggest issue for me when testing the glasses. I have long hair, and it quickly claimed a starring role in most of my videos.

While that may seem like an easy problem to fix — just tie up long hair before using the glasses — it's not that simple. Anyone with bangs or hair that isn't completely away from their face will likely experience several instances of it blocking the lens, since the glasses sit fairly high on your forehead. And on a windy day, strands of my hair kept flying in front of the lens even when it was pulled back in a ponytail.

Making matters worse, there's no way to tell if the lens is obstructed until you're viewing the video later. There's a reason the women in Snapchat's promotional photos for lens have sleek, slicked-back hair.

2. There's no real-time video playback

With basically any other camera, you can watch the video as you're recording it, ensuring that you're capturing what you intend to. But with Spectacles, it's a guess.

Because the lens has a fish-eye effect, it was hard to tell what would be in the frame and what would get cut off. While it might somewhat defeat the purpose of the Spectacles, I would have loved if I could watch my videos in real time on my phone screen.

3. The camera doesn't perform well in low light

If you planned to use your Spectacles at nighttime, good luck. The camera doesn't perform well in low light.

Snap didn't release the specs of the glasses, so the quality of the lens isn't clear. But in trying them in different lighting levels, both inside and outside, I wasn't impressed with their abilities. It's never fully dark walking around New York City, so the glasses performed OK outside.

Recording indoors, however, was another story. The glasses could barely make out anything in front of me when I had two lights on, and once I turned the lights off and relied on window light, my video was just a black screen.

Popular messaging app Snapchat – which lets users send videos and pictures that are short-lived and self-deleting – will soon be flush with cash after a mammoth initial public offering, but financial muscle alone may not be enough to upend a South Korean clone gaining a foothold in China and elsewhere in Asia.

Snapchat’s parent company, the California-based Snap Inc, sent technology industry circles into a tizzy this week following widespread reports that it had made a secret IPO filing to US regulators for a public float with a valuation of around US$20 billion (HK$155 billion).

The move fires the starting gun for the largest technology firm market debut since Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba – the owner of the South China Morning Post – went public in 2014 at a valuation of US$170.9 billion. Companies are allowed to make confidential filings for a US public listing if their annual revenue is less than US$1 billion.

Social media experts say the listing will allow Snapchat to make fresh inroads in the ephemeral social media space where posts are temporary, visual-heavy and largely light-hearted – a far cry from the more sobering, text-heavy content more typical of platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

Since launching in 2011, the messaging platform has grown rapidly from being derided as a ‘sexting’ tool for teenagers to an influential social media player. It has 150 million active users, among them US President-elect Donald Trump and his defeated Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. Sixty per cent of its users are aged between 13 and 24.

Snapchat “comes closer than any other social media to the experience of casually joking with a good friend”, said Joseph Bayer, an Ohio State University researcher who studies the psychological effects of social networks.

And Jonathan Rudd, the Asia-Pacific head of digital strategy at public relations firm Carat, said the app owed its success to young people using it as a platform “to share their moments as they were happening with who they wanted to without all the stigma associated with needing to gain likes or comments”.

But in Asia, a copycat app called Snow, owned by South Korean company Naver, rules the roost with an estimated 80 million users, and insiders say Snapchat will find it tough gaining ground against the home-grown competitor even with its multibillion, post-IPO war chest.

Snow’s features are almost a carbon copy of Snapchat. The app allows users to share goofy selfies enhanced with a myriad of “filters” that add animation from bunny ears and hanging tongues to superimposed disco backgrounds. Like Snapchat, these are short-lived and self-deleting.

There are also filters catered to Asian quirks – like masks that distort facial features to give a distinct Oriental look. Users can also add bottles of soju and bowls of rice to their pictures and videos, which disappear after 24 hours.

“Snap was just asleep at the wheel in Asia. They didn’t pay too much attention to this market, and Snow became very popular with its own set of localised features,” said Duckju Kang, head of Asia at New York-based data and research firm ValuePenguin.

Other analysts attributed Snow’s regional success to the integration of its interface with other popular Asian apps like Line, the chat app owned by its parent firm Naver.

“Snapchat has some serious catching up to do in Asia which has shown a preference for home-grown social networks like Line, WeChat and KakaoTalk,” said Jeff Rajeck, an Asia-Pacific research analyst at digital research firm Econsultancy.

Another major advantage is that Snow is not banned in China – like its California-based rival.

“I don’t think the imminent Snapchat IPO has much bearing on the success of Snow in Asia,” said Rudd, the Singapore-based digital strategy expert.

Rather, “being blocked in the [Chinese] mainland – like so many others before them including Snapchat – would clearly restrict monetisation potential and affect investor confidence”.

Some industry observers say Facebook – which in recent years has splashed the cash on acquiring mature startups like WhatsApp, Instagram and Oculus Rift – is eyeing the purchase of Snow. Snapchat in 2013 spurned an US$3 billion cash offer from Facebook.

“The interest in Snow is understandable, given it would provide Facebook with an entry into the Asian chat app landscape, data from 80 million users and crucially, allow the company to start interacting with previously unreachable Chinese consumers,” said Zoe Lawrence, the Asia-Pacific digital director at market research firm Kantar TNS.

And Nicolas Trinquier, another digital marketing expert, said: “Facebook has everything to gain in developing a Snap-like tool” as the world’s biggest social media platform gradually loses its “fun side” and becomes mainstream.

“On the other hand, Snapchat is all about fun and not worrying about impressing others and creating engagement,” said Trinquier from Bangkok-based Vero PR.

A third major player in the ephemeral social media space is Facebook-owned Instagram, which in August launched Instagram Stories – a video and photo messaging feature in which posts self-destruct.

“Instagram Stories will likely have some impact on [Snow and Snapchat] when it launches its own set of fun things like filters,” said Kang, the US-based expert.

The array of choices may be mind boggling for some, but tech-savvy millennials say they have time to dabble in all of them simultaneously.

“Snap is for sharing with my closest friends, IG [Instagram] Stories is for a bigger group of friends, and Snow is for sharing with my friends and family in Korea,” Kim Ji-Won, a 17-year-old South Korean studying in Singapore, said.

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Hundreds of people lined up off Venice Beach boardwalk on a sunny November morning to buy Snapchat’s Spectacles from a bright yellow vending machine.

It was the first day the $130 camera glasses had gone on sale, and many were there to see what all the buzz was about. Most of them worked or had friends in the tech industry. Some planned to resell the glasses at a hefty markup online.

Erick Miller had a different reason to stand in line for Spectacles that morning. He helped invent them. 

The idea behind Spectacles didn’t come from the mind of Evan Spiegel, the visionary and reclusive 26-year-old CEO behind the newly renamed Snap Inc. The genesis of Spectacles dates back to Vergence Labs, a small Los Angeles startup that Spiegel quietly acquired for $15 million in early 2014.

Vergence Labs was co-founded by Erick Miller and Jonathan Rodriguez in 2011. They made their own version of camera glasses called Epiphany Eyewear that, like Spectacles, could subtly record video with the press of a button. Business Insider’s Alyson Shontell called the product “a much cooler, cheaper alternative to Google Glass” in 2014. 

The real plan Miller and Rodriguez had for Vergence was much loftier than video glasses. The scrappy startup wanted to create a crop of futuristic gadgets, from AI-enabled helmets to gesture-controlled drones, that would effectively give people "superpowers." And the company already had working, if rudimentary, prototypes when it was swallowed by Snap.

Today the acquisition of Vergence is just a footnote in the rise of Snap, whose upcoming $25 billion IPO is expected to be the largest internet debut in years. But Vergence's untold story provides a glimpse at what could be the blueprint for Snap's growing ambition to mash wearable cameras, augmented reality technology and social media into a new class of gadgets.

Miller abruptly left Snap only six months after joining as director of technology and declined to be interviewed for this story. The other members of Vergence’s core team still work at Snap. Rodriguez calls himself the “architect” behind Spectacles on his LinkedIn.

Snap declined to make any of its employees who work on Spectacles available for interviews. But Business Insider spoke with other former Vergence employees, early investors, and people close to the startup to get the inside story of the small team that’s playing a crucial role in the future of Snap.

Giving people superpowers

During their time together at Vergence, Miller and Rodriguez’s more than a dozen experiments included a helmet display that used facial recognition to identify people in the real world based on their Facebook profiles and a drone that could be controlled with hand gestures.

While he was a graduate student at UCLA, Miller imagined a fully immersive, futuristic headset with biometric sensors that would display information over the real world and “give people what would previously be called superpowers,” according to an early interview.

He ended up pouring his life savings into prototyping the product and attracting the attention of Jonathan Rodriguez, a computer science major at Stanford whose senior thesis described “assembling an augmented reality computer with video screens and headphones as output, and inputs consisting of gaze tracking, EEG, finger tracking, and GPS.”

They pitched the idea to Stanford’s prestigious StartX business incubator program in 2012 and were accepted. In the short video application they recorded, Rodriguez eagerly explained how they wanted to “redefine the future of face-to-face interaction.”

The only problem was that building expensive hardware was impossible for an early stage startup with no funding. They realized they would have to scale back their ambitions in order to actually ship a product and settled on a discrete, RayBan-inspired pair of glasses that could record video and would sell for a starting price of $300.

The duo managed to attract two important first hires in Peter Brook, a Facebook engineer who had worked on the social network’s failed Facebook Home Android interface, and David Meisenholder, who had worked on camera glasses that Polaroid tried to sell in 2011 with the help of Lady Gaga.

After they ran a Indiegogo campaign that raised $70,000 for Epiphany Eyewear in 2012, Miller and Rodriquez landed a few prominent early investors.

One of those investors was Quora co-founder and early Facebook employee Charlie Cheever.

He told Business Insider that he invested in Vergence after meeting Rodriquez at a talk at Stanford. Rodriquez showed him multiple augmented reality demos, including a rig made of two iPhones that used cameras to overlay 3D graphics over videos.

“I could just tell that this was a really smart kid who was pushing the envelope,” Cheever said.

Miller managed to win over Adam Draper, who now runs Boost VC and is the son of prominent investor Tim Draper. In an interview, Draper recalled Miller showing up late to a 2012 dinner in Palo Alto he attended to hear pitches from other entrepreneurs.

Draper had dreamed of building his own Iron Man suit, and when Miller enthusiastically gave his vision for an augmented reality feature beginning with computer-equipped glasses, Draper was sold.

Winning over Draper turned out to be instrumental in getting Vergence off the ground, especially given how little most Silicon Valley investors were interested in wearable computers at the time.

Erick was a very persistent CEO," according to Draper. That included a relentless approach to pitching. Miller would walk around the exterior of Facebook's campus and try to catch Mark Zuckerberg walking between meetings or to his car, Draper recalled.

“It was a very cool thing that they were doing, but no one was excited about the space,” Draper said. “No one believed in it. No one was excited about this thing. Everyone was doing consumer mobile applications. Glasses with computer vision was not part of the story.”

Spiegel swoops in

Around the time it was acquired, Vergence’s team of less than 10 people was working out of a small, crowded office in downtown Los Angeles across from the local police station. They would test the glasses out on the street by secretly recording off-duty cops.

While the team was working on the software to power the glasses and trying to overcome manufacturing challenges, Miller asked Eli Morin to help form business partnerships and raise a Series A round of capital, Morin told Business Insider.

Morin had worked at a string of tech startups, including Google-acquired AdMob, and had connections at venture capital firms like Sequoia and Accel. The two had met at a conference in San Francisco earlier that year.

They brainstormed over Indian food below Vergence’s office in the fall of 2013 to figure how they could market Epiphany Eyewear and pitch the glasses to investors, according to Morin.

“They were looking for someone to help them sell the stuff,” he said in an interview. “Very few people saw the visionary potential of this product. Investors didn’t. The team was super small. It was difficult."

While the Vergence team had been developing Epiphany Eyewear, Google was beginning to promote Google Glass, a stamp-sized screen attached to eyeglass frames that displayed video and email and recorded video. Google Glass initially caused excitement among techies, but soon earned a reputation for being extremely geeky and creepy. Morin recalled how the team wanted to combat the Glass stigma.

"Our products are simple and Google's is complicated," Miller told LA Weekly in early 2014. "Ours is attainable, yet it's still aspirational. And Google's is sort of out of reach and sort of disconnected with the average consumer."

Positioning themselves as the cool underdog to Google Glass failed to resonate with investors, and Vergence never raised its Series A.

In early November 2013, Morin proposed they look at partnering with Snapchat, which was based in Los Angeles as well and popularizing video messaging. He said he discussed the idea with Miller over ice cream in Koreatown and gave a demo of how the app worked to the rest of the team the same day.

“They had never used Snapchat before,” he recalled. Once he showed them the app, Rodriguez remembered a connection he had to Evan Spiegel — the two lived on the same floor of their dorm during their freshman year at Stanford.

Morin only came into the office every other week as a business advisor and was never involved in conversations with Snapchat, but Spiegel clearly saw the potential. He quietly brought on most of the team, excluding Morin and a few others, four months later for $11 million in cash and $4 million in stock.

The details of Vergence’s acquisition were never supposed to be public, and they didn’t leak until the hacking of Sony’s email servers in November 2014 unearthed emails from Snap board member and Sony CEO Michael Lynton.

Even Vergence’s earliest investors were left in the dark about the acquisition. Charlie Cheever, who was the startup’s very first investor, received a phone call one day from Miller who said nothing more than, “We sold the company. We can’t tell you who. You’ll get a check in the mail.”

“In hindsight, it’s a little unusual,” Cheever said.

Morin is currently seeking to settle contract disputes with Snap over equity compensation in Vergence he claims to be owed. Emails and documents provided by Morin to Business Insider seem to show that Miller agreed to a contract that promised Morin 1% equity in December 2013.

The contract was never signed — Morin said he lost contact with Miller after it was drafted, and didn't find out about the acquisition until the Sony leaks almost a year later. 

“As a startup person you do stuff based on trust and equity,” he said. “I didn’t get a penny out of all the time and effort I put into that.”

A Snap spokesman couldn't find record of receiving the demand letters Morin claimed to have sent through his lawyer and declined to comment further.

Morin wasn’t the only one involved in Vergence to have disputes with Miller. Two early employees who didn’t join Snap said that Miller created an intense office environment and was prone to fits of anger.

“I think for everyone who stayed, they had to do a lot of self-talk and convince themselves that they liked him or that he was doing what was best,” one early employee who requested anonymity said. “If you met him out and about you would like him, but under pressure and in closed quarters it was a real challenge.”

Miller left Snap after serving as its director of technology for six months and now runs a small VC firm in Los Angeles called Hyperseed Ventures.

What Vergence says about the future of Snap

The acquisition of Vergence was a foreshadowing of Snap's new identity as a "camera company." 

Rodriquez, Brook, Meisenholder, and a few other Vergence employees still work at Snap on the Spectacles team and Snap Labs, a secretive division working on other hardware and software products.

Business Insider previously reported that Snap has looked at various types of wearable cameras in addition to the Spectacles, including small clip-on video cameras, and it has had acquisition talks with several camera companies. Snap has hired hardware engineers from companies like Apple, Nest, and GoPro.

The first generation of Spectacles only have one camera for recording video, but Miller and Rodriquez had imagined a three-camera system that could overlay graphics onto the real world.

“I think there’s great potential in the displays we’re researching to absolutely erase the lines between virtual reality and real reality,” Rodriguez told Stanford’s college newspaper in 2013.

Snap has been aggressively experimenting with augmented reality in its appand patents. Early investors like Adam Draper predict that Vergence’s small team will play a key role in whatever comes next.

“They scaled back their vision to take their first step, and that was the step they got acquired on,” he said. “It was the first step towards taking over the world.”

SEE ALSO: What it’s like to work at Snapchat, one of the most secretive companies in tech

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NOW WATCH: We got our hands on Snapchat's Spectacles — here's what they're like

For most of us, we’ll have to stick with the dog ears (and that annoying tongue) for a while longer as we continue the hunt for Snap Inc.’s hard-to-find hardware product, ‘Spectacles.’ If you’re lucky enough to have snagged a pair, you’ve already got access to a hidden filter, as detailed by Twitter user Moshe Isaacian.

Once you point the Spectacles at the lettering on the protective case, a filter unlocks and shows floating bubbles that presumably contain the snaps of others — or at least a handful curated by Snap Inc.

It’s nothing particularly mind-blowing, but it does detail the future implications of Snap Inc. hardware in the augmented reality space. Besides, we all love a good Easter egg from time-to-time.

SEE ALSO: The founding story of Spectacles — how a small glasses startup that struggled to raise money turned into the future of $25 billion Snapchat

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NOW WATCH: First thoughts on Snapchat's Spectacles — the sunglasses everyone is going crazy for