The untold story of Snapchat what make millionaires and a Ghost that Haunts Mark Zuckerberg part eight

Snapchat: The Ghost That Haunts Zuckerberg. Part eight

The real future of Snapchat.

The future of reality In 2016, Evan renamed the company Snap Inc and began plans to expand the business beyond Snapchat. Their extremely simplistic website states that Snap is a camera company, and they believe that reinventing the camera represents our greatest opportunity to improve the way people live and communicate.

Snap then announced its first move into hardware with the launch of Snapchat Spectacles, a pair of sunglasses that with the tap of a button will record a video that is wirelessly sent to your Snapchat account. Evan tested them out himself on a hike and commented “When I got the footage back and watched it, I could see my own memory, through my own eyes—it was unbelievable.” That’s because the glasses record video in a 115-degree circular format, mimicking how the human eye sees things. Admittedly, it may sound like a dystopian Black Mirror episode, and Evan was quick to downplay comparisons to Google Glass by saying that there’d be a light on the front so people knew if a user was recording anything, and Spectacles were simply a fun toy.

But the truth is Spectacles could be so much more than a toy, because of Snapchat’s heavy investment into augmented reality… The world got a first taste of AR with Pokemon Go, but once the novelty wore off, the hype seemed to fade away. But Snap has been leading the way with AR ever since, with its camera lenses that can change the world around you. But this goes far beyond dog ears and vomiting rainbows. Snap is already working with brands to let people see what their clothing would look like if they were wearing it.

Now, that may look kind of cool, but you could say it still seems a bit gimmicky. However, that’s where Spectacles could come in - instead of seeing augmented reality through a phone screen, imagine seeing it through AR glasses that you wear all day - it would quite literally be a whole new way to see the world. It’s a bit like that scene in Free Guy where he puts the glasses on, and suddenly there’s this whole new layer on top of the world. - a layer where anything can be added or redesigned. Truly unlimited creative possibilities.

In fact, because of Snap’s AR work, along with its acquisition of Bitmoji which lets users create a virtual version of themselves, some think Snap could also play a big role in the metaverse - once again putting them in direct competition with Facebook, or as they’re now called, Meta. However, I will cover the metaverse in a future blog. For now, it’s unclear exactly what Snap’s end game is. And because its demographic skews so young, many don’t even realize that Snap has been quietly innovating, secretly making many acquisitions, and investing heavily in areas like machine learning and artificial intelligence. It’s often still referred to as just a messaging app for kids. But what started out as an app for sexting, could soon be at the forefront of many new technologies, and changing how we experience reality. Or on the flip side, it’s also entirely possible that these new experiments fail completely, and it's Zuckerberg who has the last laugh. All we know for sure is that the story of Snapchat still has plenty of twists still to come.

However, whilst Snapchat has been repeatedly copied, lately, Snapchat has been doing some copying of its own - like when they launched a feature called Spotlight, which is essentially a TikTok clone. But that didn’t stop kids from illegally making millions of dollars from it. To find out more, just click here to read the next blog. I will see you there. Cheers.

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