We're a society ruled by plastic and convenient shopping. The days of "Dodgy Dan's Emporium of Spurious Imports" are long gone, replaced with the clean convenience of web-based comfort and purchasing ease. Come to think of it, you can pretty much use your parents' or partner's credit details to buy anything from Mace to Tazers, from nanchuks to nightsticks and from night vision goggles to spy camera glasses.



I Spy

Spy camera glasses are fixtures of spy movies. The only thing more disturbing than the fact that they're used in everyday life is the possibility that there is a sufficient corresponding demand to warrant what appears to be a sizeable international market for it. Rather than being the reserve of some backwoods survivalist cult, a quick Google search will throw up any number of physical and web-based outlets where anyone in practically any country can purchase a set of spy camera glasses. These spy camera glasses can set you back anywhere from around US$50 for the school boy spy-on-the-girls-in-gym-class variety to thousands of dollars for the covert, top secret, high-grade, special forces military specification version that makes you feel you've had computers implanted in your cornea. A set of spy camera glasses like these may be the closest you can get to being either a T-1000 Terminator or an MI6 agent.

Now More than Fiction

Spy camera glasses do occupy an interesting place in the evolution of gadgets and widgets, from fantasy spy fiction right up there with Maxwell Smart's "shoe-phone" to real-life, not-to-leave-home-without essential secret agent equipment. In many ways, spy camera glasses hold a similar position in the world of modern day popular culture as video conferencing, remote satellite surveillance imaging, video telephones, and even the now humble cellular telephone.

No more than two decades ago, spy camera glasses were regarded as nothing more than childish fancies. The first time I came across the idea of a videophone conference was in a Disney comic circa the 1980s. Daisy and Donald were making plans via Uncle Gyro's new "fandangled crackpot invention" - a TV screen with a small camera built into the top casing connected to a telephone. Today, I can talk to my editor via the webcam/microphone device built into the top of my laptop screen. I remember the back pages of the same comic featuring ads for zit-makers, switchblade combs, sea monkeys, x-ray specs, and of course, some kind of practical joke spy camera glasses.

The Fashionable Spy

Spy camera glasses may have been fiction once upon a time, but they're not the fodder of books and comics anymore. As a matter of fact, these spy camera glasses evolved so much over the years you can now find them in any color and style. Most of the spy camera glasses on the market currently would look more at home on an Olympic speed skater or a gold medal-winning sailboard rider. Sure, they were cool back in the late eighties and even the early nineties, but a pair of these spy camera glasses are certainly not going to help even the most invisible of men keep themselves under cover and out of danger. Remember, when it comes to spy camera glasses or any glasses for the matter, fashion first - function later!