Lady Gaga had used ipod minis for her breakthrough Poker Face video. Polaroid worked with her to develop a consumer camera glasses product inspired by the video. The concept was announced at CES by Lady Gaga as we privately demo’d working mock-ups with partners to kick-off the program boosted by the positive coverage and feedback.

The product concept and ID was led by Ammunition Group as pair of glasses that had a camera in the nose bridge and would capture photos while you were out. Below each eye was a display that showed the new pictures and playlists.

This was before Google Glass and we were able to make it work with camera chipsets and custom PCBAs and flex circuits with dual batteries and folding mechanism to store.

It was a fun and tough project - and ultimately got suspended as we had readied for tool release and NPI with a CM in Taiwan. Looking back it was poor timing to launch this product as Lady Gaga was releasing her follow up album and it missed the co-promotion opportunity for Polaroid and Lady Gaga.

One of my lead mechanical design engineers went on to do a camera glasses start-up inspired by this project, which was then bought by Snap and developed into their Spectacles product and team.