Snapchat possibly developing smart glasses

A report from CNET details a crop of hirings from major augmented reality groups that point to Snapchat’s possible development of a pair of smart glasses.

The hirings include those from places like Microsoft’s HoloLens, PTC’s (formerly Qualcomm’s) Vuforia and eye-tracking tech maker Eyefluence.

The company showed interest in augmented reality during the last hype wave surrounding Google Glass.

Vergence Labs, which produced a pair of glasses equipped with an embedded camera, was acquired by Snapchat for $15 million in March of 2014.

The acquisition accompanied a larger $50 million acquisition of Scan.me, a QR code-scanning/creating technology that would later manifest itself it the company’s Snaptags feature.

Read also: Skype kills its TV app quietly

Snapchat did not openly advertise these acquisitions then, details of it were leaked in the Sony data hack in December of 2014.

It was an especially odd-sounding move then, but fast-forward a couple of years past the acquisitions and the company has added a few billion dollars to its valuation, as well as a variety of mainstay features like its Discover tab and geofilters.

The real question is whether Snapchat is using these hires to attempt to learn more about augmented reality tech and more effectively adapt its platform for usage on smart glasses or whether the engineering folk are actually just building glasses with the goal of a consumer release.

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