Snapchat's Spectacles were camera glasses nobody wanted to wear in public

Snapchat's parent company Snap Inc. launched Spectacles in November 2016: $130 sunglasses with a built-in camera that recorded 10-second video clips from the wearer's perspective. The product was marketed as a fun, casual way to capture moments hands-free.

But Spectacles suffered from the same social acceptance problem that would later plague Google Glass. Wearing camera glasses in public made people uncomfortable — both the wearer and the people being recorded. The 10-second limit was restrictive, the video quality was mediocre, and the novelty wore off quickly.

Snap sold approximately 220,000 units and was left with roughly $40 million in unsold inventory. The company wrote off the loss and continued to iterate on Spectacles, but the product never achieved mainstream adoption. The case illustrated how a product can be fun in a demo and useless in daily life, and how social discomfort is a product defect that no amount of marketing can fix.