After a huge early buzz, Snapchat’s wearables ultimately bellyflopped. The company says it lost $40 million on the device. But that failure wasn’t enough to dissuade the company from giving things another go — and from the sound of it, the second version of Spectacles find the company taking hardware a bit more seriously this time around.
The head-mounted devices took a step closer to reality this week, hitting the FCC in a filing first noted by Variety. The paperwork outlines a “wearable video camera” called “Spectacles…Model 002.”
Last June, we noted that a small Snap team has been working covertly on a new version of the device that could potentially embrace the company’s love of augmented reality, a fact seemingly bolstered by a whole slew of patent applications (insofar as a patent application can be taken as confirmation of intent).
More reports trickled through early last month, pointing at a second and third version of the glasses set to arrive in 2018 and 2019, respectively. Version 2.0 is said to mostly be a fix of many of the issues that helped doom the first generation of the device, while 2019’s model will reportedly sport two cameras, adding depth effects to the devices, likely embracing the aforementioned AR capabilities.
The new FCC filing doesn’t reveal a lot of additional information about the hardware, though improved WiFi for faster file transfers does appear to be present. That’s certainly in line with reports that the company is working to make an all-around better product here.
The existence of the filing doesn’t confirm that the new Spectacles will be hitting the market soon, or ever, really, but it does point to the company exploring a return to the category in spite of a massive loss. Hardware is, as they say, difficult.
