These days, some rumors came out, claiming that Snapchat is working at something new. It seems that the social media startup is recruiting hardware experts for a new and interesting project.
Snapchat is currently valued at 16 billion dollars and has some of the best employees on the market, who have also worked on Nokia phones and the popular UE Boom Bluetooth speakers owned by Logitech. However, until this moment, the social media startup has never produced a single physical product, even if it has approximately 100 million daily users.
So, the rumors are indicating that Snapchat has decided to make its first piece of consumer hardware. We are talking about a set of new smart glasses that customers will actually want to wear.
Unfortunately, a spokeswoman for Snapchat declined to talk about this new project. Nowadays, Internet giants have started to massively invest in virtual reality, for example Facebook who paid no less than 2 billion dollars for Oculus. Moreover, Google is also a key investor in VR startup Magic Leap, meaning that it is no surprise that Even Spiegel, Snapchat’s CEO and co-founder has decided to
enter the smart goggles field.
Snapchat also bought Vergence Labs in 2014, for 15 million dollars, which is a startup that makes a kind of glasses that record videos of what the users see. Five Vergence employees still work at Snapchat, including a co-founder of the company and two consumer product designers.
Another interesting fact is that Snapchat has started to build Snapchat Research in February 2015. This team is composed of a larger variety of scientists and software engineers specializing in machine learning and computer vision. Facebook and Google already use this artificial technique to recognize people or objects in photos users share online.
So, the big question is if Snapchat uses these hires and experiments to attempt to learn more about augmented reality and how to adapt its platform for usage on smart glasses or if they actually are building smart glasses?
Using Snapchat on smart glasses at the moment makes no sense, because they don’t have something to offer. So, this determines suspicions that the company is focusing more on building its own smart glasses and optimizing AR technology for its apps.
At the moment, the augmented reality field is not really stable, because most companies are experimenting a wide variety of eye-tracking, hand-tracking, head-tracking and motion-tracking tech to control their devices. However, if Snapchat will be able to use their AR-minded team to make advances on this field, there will be some obvious benefits to the company.
Snapchat was founded by three Stanford University students in 2011 and started out as a place to share photos that would be erased after just a few seconds. Five years later, this platform is also a video streaming giant where users view over 7 billion videos a day.
This means that Snapchat is close to Facebook, where users viewed 8 billion videos a day in November. To be added that Snapchat has turned down a 3 billion buyout offer from Facebook in 2013.
