Gadgetory

few accessories are more important for the summer than a good pair of sunglasses but these shades can do a lot more than just protect your eyes these are snapchat spectacles and they're packed with a ton of tech to help you capture and share all that summertime fun how do they work let's find out I'm Bill Detweiler and this is cracking open snapchat spectacles are basically a video camera built into a pair of sunglasses the camera is mounted above the right lens and the mic is hidden just behind it by the left lens are a pair of LED indicators the record or the snap button and a charging connector is hidden next to the temple hinge our first step in cracking open the spectacles is to remove the temples or the arms that run alongside your head with the temples removed we broke out our trusty heat gun and loosen the adhesive on the plastic covers that protect the electronics mounted to each side of the frame after gently prying off the covers we got our first look at the tech inside the spectacles on the left under the snap button are the battery charging circuitry LED indicators and snap button contact on the right are the camera microphone and all the chips that make the spectacles smarter than your average shades now to get a closer look at all this tiny hardware we first remove the battery now attached to the battery is the charging circuitry and the LED indicator that lets the wearer know when the glasses are recording next to come out were the snap button contact and the front-facing LED indicator now turning our attention to the other side of the glasses we detached the cable that connects the electronics on the right side to the battery and the circuits on the left then we removed the miniature circuit boards the mic and the camera and Amborella a 12 wearable camera processor is the brains of these specs this system-on-chip handles video and audio capture and encoding and it's integrated ARM Cortex a9 CPU runs pretty much everything else the spectacles have a four gig flash storage chip it holds all your videos until you transfer them to your phone and a Nordic semiconductor wireless sock provides Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity so what did we learn from cracking open the snapchat spectacles well basically snapchat took existing wearable camera technology like that found inside police body cameras and put it inside an oddly stylish pair of sunglasses while the spectacles only do one thing record video for snapchat they do it surprisingly well according to most reviews so if you use snapchat you'll probably want a pair of these now for more information on the snapchat spectacles check out our full review on SEANET and our smart persons guide on sister site TechRepublic to see more tear down photos and read my full hardware analysis go to TechRepublic comm forward slash cracking open