Lens Fest 2022: Celebrating Five Years of the Snap AR Community
This morning we kicked off Lens Fest, our fifth annual developer conference for our global AR community. We're thrilled to celebrate those who are driving AR forward today.
This morning we kicked off Lens Fest, our fifth annual developer conference for our global AR community. Tune in on demand to learn about the power of the Snap AR platform through two days of virtual sessions, workshops, networking, and more at lensfest.live.
Mobile AR Scale
363 million people use our Snapchat camera technology every day on average to talk with their friends and family, try on new looks, or learn something new about the world around them. Snapchatters engage with AR experiences an average of 6 billion times per day, evolving the way we use computing in our daily lives.
AR creators, developers, and partners are tapping into our community’s engagement and excitement about augmented reality today and its vast potential for the future. Today we announced that there are over 300,000 creators, developers and teams from around the world who’ve built more than 3 million AR Lenses.
Building Businesses with Snap AR
With hundreds of millions of people using AR on Snapchat daily, AR developers are building strong businesses on our platform. In 2021, AR studio Paper Triangles made nearly $4 million building Lenses for brands – from makeup looks for Sephora to shoe try-on for Crocs. Live Nation worked with a number of AR agencies to enhance fan experiences at some of their largest festivals – plai brought Roofus to life at Bonnaroo, and GoSpooky lit up the sky with Rolling Loud’s iconic Punx characters.
As our AR community grows their careers and businesses, we’re continually exploring how we can show our support. We’re now experimenting with a small group of creators and developers to build Lenses with digital goods, including power-ups, AR items, and extra tools within a Lens that Snapchatters can unlock with Snap Tokens. Over the coming weeks, these Lenses will roll out in select locations, and they’ll appear in the Lens Carousel and Lens Explorer alongside millions of Lenses built by Snap and our creator community. We look forward to learning about the long-term potential of digital goods alongside AR creators in this pilot program and with our broader Snapchatter community.
Innovating with Snap AR
We’ve built our platform so developers can join us in pushing the boundaries of AR further, faster.
Over the past five years, we’ve taken the most innovative machine learning and computer vision technologies developed by our team, made these tools adaptable for a wide range of use cases, and wrapped them in an intuitive interface through Lens Studio. AR experiences are created and published in Lens Studio so that people can use them on Snapchat, in other apps through Camera Kit, or on our next-generation Spectacles.
Lens Studio’s best-in-class suite of capabilities understand what’s in the camera’s scene, reflect how people interact naturally, and render AR elements realistically. With such a large tool chest of advanced technologies, there’s an endless number of combinations to create useful AR experiences for learning, shopping, wellness, and play.
Parisian team Flat Pixel built Danger Bot, a fast-paced multiplayer AR game that challenges players to work together to defeat a robot.
While Beyond Studio, based in Amsterdam, built Hybrid Jacket, an immersive, futuristic fashion try-on experience.
And Los Angeles-based Michael French created The Knowledge Pool, transforming the fountain at the Los Angeles Central Library into a series of interactive educational lessons, just by scanning your library card.
These are just a few of the innovative Lenses from our first-ever Snap AR Lensathon earlier this year. Today at Lens Fest, we announced a new Lensathon, challenging creators to push what’s possible in AR. Now through January 31st, creators can submit Lenses to compete for a part of the $200,000 prize pool.
AR is core to the Snapchat experience today, and over time, we see even greater opportunities for hardware to bring it to a new dimension. Our ambition is that AR can be even more natural through glasses that let you use your hands to interact with AR around you.
Over the past two years, hundreds of developers from 30 countries have experimented with the next generation of Spectacles, building hundreds of Lenses right in Lens Studio – from learning to read music to saying what constellation you want to see.
The advanced hardware and software, distribution channels, and ways we support growth through the Snap AR platform all work together to fuel the creativity and businesses of our global AR community.
We’re thrilled to celebrate those who are driving AR forward today.
