Snapchat is no longer a company. Now, it’s just a product owned by the newly announced company Snap Inc. That’s right. Snapchat changed its name, launched a new company and introduced the first of perhaps many hardware products.

“Now that we are developing other products…we need a name that goes just beyond one product—but doesn’t lose the familiarity and fun of our team and brand,” explained Snap CEO Evan Spiegel.

What is that new product? Spectacles. Spectacles are sunglasses with a video camera installed that lets users record clips up to 10 seconds long that can be uploaded to Snapchat Memories. Spectacles, as Snapchat sees them, let users create memories from their own perspectives.

Wait… What?!

This news hit on a Friday night, and as I stared at the announcement, I couldn’t help but ask, “What is going on here?” Then I realized that this is Snapchat, a company founded on changing the game, changing the game once again.

Snapchat was founded on the idea of taking friction found on other platforms, primarily privacy, and doing away with it. Spectacles is that, once again. It’s a bet to do what Google did with Google Glass more successfully. Will they gain traction? Will wearers become known as the Snapchat equivalent of “glassholes?” Maybe.

But maybe not. And if they do take off by allowing people to seamlessly capture micro moments, it could give Snapchat an entirely new data set from what someone sees, where they are, what products they’re viewing and so on. That could turn into an incredibly valuable data point for Snapchat.

But this announcement goes beyond Spectacles.

This is a New Vision

Snapchat has described itself as a “camera company.” Not a social network, not a messaging application. It is a camera company. This gives it the right to develop software, hardware and anything in between, and it puts it on its own playing field in the social landscape. It’s competitive set is so much more nuanced than Facebook, Instagram and so on. It’s competing against camera apps, social networks, messaging services and more, allowing it to be agile and redefine itself moment by moment.

A Single Focus

It can play in a lot of areas, but Snap’s aim is the camera. And you can bet Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and others are watching what exactly it will do next. All of those platforms have placed afocus on the camera, but it is not the focus for them. It is one of many. Snap is going to continue to push the focus on photos and videos to another level, and we can bet competitors won’t sit idly by. Snap just added fuel to the visual arms race.