A Chinese social media company tencent released its own adaptation of smart glasses, but they look and work a lot like Snapchat’s Spectacles. These glasses area knows as “Weishi” and include a small camera in the front corner which can be used to take pictures and record a video or film from a first-person’s perspective. To the eye they are a lot like the snapchat’s spectacles but there are many possible implications that snapchat can take from tencent’s glasses. Instead of tencent’s glasses being a cheap copy of snapchat’s spectacles, the development og these glasses can be in the favour of snapchat. Tencent bought up a lot of shares from snapchat last november, has a large part in the company and has tried to become partners with snapchat in the past. If both the companies become partners, they will be able to share the required resources in terms of the smart glasses to further improve and benefit each other. They can also achieve this through a partnership on the device.
Snapchat is not done with its spectacles, they always wanted to improve it and be more than just camera glasses. Patents revealed that snapchat is planning to further develop and provide the feature of augmented reality overlay through their device. Since then it has been confirmed by several tweets from the company’s owner that they do actually want to add this feature in their glasses and that the initial release of their spectacles was just the first version to come. This will allow the wearer to place digital objects over the real world, but they most probably ran into some boundaries on what they could and couldn’t add in the spectacles.
After the launch of spectacles, snapchat changed the tagline of its comapny to “A camera Company”. Due to the increasing competition from facebook, snapchat is shifting away from its app. But making smart glasses is a very hard task. Even facebook, with their neverending capabilities, said that their version of smart glasses which are still in development can still be years away untill it meets the public.
It is very clear that snapchat needs their spectacles to give them the next push as from their current growth, snapchat will soon go bankrupt before they can even start to make a profit, which is going to lead them to their ultimate termination. Unless they work on their spectales and give them the badly needed AR (Art Installation) version. With Tencent’s immense user base and the development assets, they just might be able to help snapchat with this issue.
Reports from TechCrunch state that Tencent has proffered guidance adn advice to the CEO of snapchat on the matter of product stratergy in the past. It is possible that snapchat and tencent would set up a deal on the development of their weishi glasses. This deal could potentially include the combination of their resources and that would mean that in the future we might see an AR version of the snapchat spectacles.