Making Pixy a limited run—a drop!—saves Snap from hardware’s long-term headaches while it generates buzz for itself around a cutesy item. Buzz for Pixy carries an importance outsized to the dimensions around the Tinkerbell-ish gadget. Why? Snap wants to thoroughly convince us that it makes attractive products. For Snap’s augmented reality vision to pan out , it’ll need to convince a wary public that we really to buy AR headsets and wear them around. Even the best such headsets—and Snap’s $149.
Snap handed out some numbers to bolster the sense that it’s succeeding. The company’s core AR product, Lenses, the camera software that places animated sunglasses on your face or makes you appear as a cartoon character, has been used 5 trillion times since the company introduced them around seven years ago. Shopping is one of the business cases that make the most sense around Lenses, where you might be able to see how some clothing item looks on you without handling the physical good.
We didn’t get word on anything that expansive on Thursday, just a little perspective on Discover, a separate video feed from creators and established publishers. These are higher-touch productions than what’s in Spotlight, closer to tiny TV episodes. Snap says 25 independent creators have now gotten syndicated shows on Discover, which more than 155 million users watched from June to December 2021.
Such a cool idea, but I feel like this would've been ideal in 2016-2018.