Snapchat has entered the hardware market, everyone, and late Friday they unveiled Spectacles, a set of sunglasses with a 115-degree camera built in that is supposed to approximate a person's natural field of vision. "Imagine one of your favorite memories. What if you could go back and see that memory the way you experienced it? That’s why we built Spectacles," writes the company in a blog post about the product. Spectacles come with "one of the smallest wireless video cameras in the world, capable of taking a day’s worth of Snaps on a single charge," and unlike the ambitious, cyborg-ish Google Glass, they're being marketed more just as a fun toy that captures 10-second snippets of video that can be then transferred to the Snapchat app as Memories. Also unlike Google Glass, they're cheap — just $130 compared to $1,500 — and they actually look cool.

Also on Friday, Snapchat announced that the company would now be called Snap, Inc., which as The Verge explains is part of their strategy to position themselves as "a camera company" rather than a social media company, "a canny move given how Facebook dominates online communication."

Below, the first promo video.

Spectacles are one-size-fits-all, and come in three colors, black, teal, or coral, and they'll be commercially available this fall.

With Spectacles, Snap Inc. is also attempting to reimagine the very way we take pictures, introducing a circular video format that can be viewed in any orientation of a cell phone, and is suppose to better mimic human sight. As Snap CEO Evan Spiegel tells the Wall Street Journal, the rectangle format is a vestige of when we printed photos on paper, and isn't necessary anymore — and he says that people having to hold their phones up all the time to shoot video is "like [having] a wall in front of your face.” With these glasses, you can now record snippets of life as its lived, with your hands free to do other things, like hug people and pick up children/dogs.

And even though the company is not aiming for wide distribution of the glasses just yet, Spiegel hints to the Journal that Snap is essentially looking ultimately to "seize the means of image production" back from the smartphone, and dominate this new field.

Google Glass faced some backlash for the potential invasion of privacy it posed — you could never know if someone had his or her face computer recording you in public. But since these are sunglasses, it makes it more obvious if someone is using them indoors — not to mention the fact that the 10-second limit to Snaps makes the act of recording seem less onerous. Snapchat itself has built a brand based on ephemerality and disposability, as well as discretion — you're among friends, the app implies, and whatever happens on Snapchat stays on Snapchat (in theory).

Spiegel certainly is on to something, with 150 million daily Snapchatters, i.e. 15 million more active daily users than Twitter. At 26, he's attuned to the ways in which mobile conversations are morphing into something multidimensional and media-rich, and the core of the business is going to remain the app for the foreseeable future. In fact, with so many active users in the prime 18-to-34-year-old demographic, Snapchat pitches itself to potential advertisers as being like a particularly popular television station — i.e. what MTV was to marketers of the 80's and 90's. Except now most of the content young people are watching is shot on the fly by their friends, most of the time just doing something dumb or spontaneous to make each other laugh.

But, also, he's 26, and mistakes are going to be made. The company has been known for some insensitive missteps all in the name of fun, like racist "lenses" for the app, and back when Spiegel was a frat boy at Stanford, his email signature included the phrase "fuckbitchesgetlaid," just to recall a tidbit the likes of the Wall Street Journal have forgotten.

So, be prepared for these Spectacles to start showing up on beaches and in restaurants, and for a whole new round of discussion about what we want our future to look like, with everybody recording everything all the time. And a possible new round of backlash.

Previously: Snapchat Once Again Proves Its Racial Cluelessness, Removes Slanty-Eyed Filter