Snap Inc. has a replacement for the cheap phone stands and the awkwardly stretched arms of modern self-portrait: a yellow square-shaped drone with a camera that costs $ 230, weighs about a quarter of a pound and hovers around you to pull you in automatically. The original inspiration for the pocket-sized drone, called the Pixy, was: “What if Tinker Bell was your personal photographer?” CEO Evan Spiegel said in an interview. “On the one hand, you have these bulky, almost dangerous drones that you have to control manually with a remote control. And on the other hand, you have a phone that can not fly “. After shooting, Pixy can land in the owner’s hand independently. Images are automatically uploaded to the owner’s Snapchat application. It is available for pre-order in the US and France and starts shipping in late May.
Snap, a self-proclaimed camera company, is known for its Snapchat social networking app, popular with young people for sending photo and video messages with disappearing annotations. Snap has been working at Pixy since at least 2017 and reportedly developed the device with the Beijing-based drone company Zero Zero Robotics. The drone is another product emerging from Snap hardware labs and is intended to promote the pursuit of the still-embryonic market for augmented reality – the much-touted technology that transcends digital graphics into real-world images.
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Spiegel says Snap’s focus is exclusively on AR. “Our bet is fixed in the real world. “We just believe that people enjoy the real world and enjoy being with their friends, but also that it makes computers much more intimate, accessible and easy to use.”
The company announced an agreement with the concert giant Live Nation Entertainment Inc. to develop augmented reality experiences for shows and music festivals such as Lollapalooza. The special effects can be extended from the stage and displayed on the phones and finally in the Concerts. Concertgoing matches the app’s demographics: Snap says it reaches more than 75% of 13- to 34-year-olds in more than 20 countries.
Snap also revealed that it has acquired a San Francisco-based AR company called Forma, which has developed technology to allow people to create photorealistic avatars of themselves. Snap uses Forma technology to allow its users to envision themselves trying on clothes, part of a broad drive to bring augmented reality tools to retailers, fashion brands and users and help them shop in the app. Snapchat users are already familiar with avatars, after the company acquired the maker of Bitmoji in 2016, the personalized animated stickers that people can send in their messages to react to each other’s content.
Snap, which is remarkably free of recent competitors such as Meta and Twitter Inc., also used its annual event to inform its user development. He said Snapchat app now has more than 600 million monthly active users, up from 500 million a year ago, making it bigger than Twitter, but not as big as Instagram or another rising competitor, TikTok.
Commenting on the turmoil surrounding Twitter and its planned acquisition by Elon Musk, Spiegel said: “I believe Elon is a strong user with a great deal of knowledge about Twitter and where to get it in the future. “I am optimistic that they have many great successes ahead of them.”
