David Brown

In February 2014, just one week after its release, a tech writer named Sarah Slocum brought her glass into a punk bar called Molotov's in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district.

She started filming and was soon accosted.

The glass device ripped right off her face.

Now, in March 2014, with a backlash against glassholes only growing, why would Snapchat choose to pivot to smart glasses, which will theoretically have the same privacy issues?

Here's the thing, the media's obsession with Glass, both the hype and the backlash, may be a blessing in disguise for hopeful competitors.

Glass has certainly raised awareness of smart glasses as a product category, and in many ways the Epiphany Glasses Snapchat just bought compare favorably with its rivals.

Unlike glass, epiphanies are already available to the public.

If you want a pair, you can order them right from the company website, no appointment needed.

And epiphany glasses start at just $300 compared to the $1,500 price tag of glass, while simultaneously looking far less conspicuous.

Even Diane von Furstenberg couldn't disguise the fact that Google Glass looks, well, a bit silly, like a Star Trek costume someone whipped up for Comic-Con.

Epiphany glasses, meanwhile, look like normal Ray-Bans.

That form factor and the low price will make Epiphanies a lot more appealing, especially to Snapchat's younger, hipper user base.

Of course, the reason epiphanies can sell for this lower price point is that they don't have as many features.

For now at least, epiphany glasses are simply recording devices, not an attempt to replace your phone.

They can't even take photos.

They just record video.

But interestingly, this distinction may be lost on the general public.

After all, most folks think recording video is all that Google's glass can do as well.

Anything else is just details.

Snapchat's Evan Spiegel may have snapped up Epiphany at just the right time.