Lens Fest 2025: Building the Next Decade of AR Together

2025 marks a defining year for our global developer community. We’re celebrating a decade of Lenses, witnessing the incredible power of AI to transform how we interact with the world, and preparing to launch Specs publicly next year.

Since the very first Lens, our vision has been simple: to build technology that brings people closer together by helping them express themselves and connect with friends. Over the last 10 years, our developer community — 400,000 people who have built more than 4 million Lenses — have turned this idea into one of the largest and most advanced ecosystems for creative expression.

Our goal is to be the most developer friendly platform in the world, and our commitment has never been stronger. Today we’re excited to announce major updates focused on three core areas: making Snap the best place to build, helping creators turn passion into business results, and giving developers world-class tools to push AR forward. 

Over 175 million people play Lens Games on Snapchat every month, and the number of Snapchatters sharing them has more than doubled – up 130% since just last year. We’re doubling down on giving you the resources to build fun, social games that bring friends together.

We’re excited to integrate Lens Games directly into Chat with our new Games Chat Drawer, placing games closer to where friends connect.

We've also expanded the Games category in the Asset Library with components designed to streamline your workflow:

• Character Controller: Switch between third-person, side-scroller, or top-down gameplay styles.

• Camera Controller: Change angles with presets for follow, orbit, and third-person views.

• Input System: Customize controls—blink to jump, or move with a joystick.

• Bitmoji Suite: Bring Bitmoji friends, animations, and props right into your game.

We introduced Turn Based gameplay and leveled up the Leaderboard with cleaner friend highlights and notifications. Next year, we’ll introduce live multiplayer matchmaking, a new foundation for real-time social play that makes Snap the most natural place to find and share games with friends.

We've added powerful new capabilities to Lens Studio that transform how people see themselves and the world around them, allowing you to create even higher-fidelity, personalized, and more engaging Lenses.

Here are some of the updates designed to give you more expressive power:

• Realistic StyleGen: Expanding on our fullscreen ML effects, this new option unlocks true-to-life fit, texture, lighting, and perspective, allowing you to create scenes with stunning, real-time detail.

• Enhanced FaceGen: The next iteration of FaceML, providing finer details and reliable control over hair, facial geometry, and expression for complex AR experiences.

• Selfie Attachments: Bringing state-of-the-art 3D asset generation to life with automatic, context-aware real-time AR placement.

• New Face Effects Editor: A streamlined, intuitive interface to quickly iterate and produce professional-quality makeup, sparkles, and gems.

• AI Clips (coming soon): Tapping into our ultra-fast video generative model, this will allow you to produce your own image-to-video Lenses for fun, personalized, and instantly shareable videos.

Building on the success of Challenge Tags and Lens Creator Rewards, we’re excited to roll out major updates to our monetization offerings.

After a successful pilot, we’re expanding Lens Creator Rewards with Lens+ Payouts, allowing creators to make money based on engagement from Lens+ and Snapchat Platinum subscribers. Whether you create games, AI experiences, or effects, you can now build a portfolio of monetized Lenses.

Beyond Snapchat, Camera Kit extends Snap’s leading AR technology to apps, websites, and AR mirrors across the globe, reaching more than 68 million monthly active users in Q3. Starting today, Camera Kit remains free, but now it’s fully yours. In response to developer feedback, we’ve removed mandatory branding, giving you the freedom to create flexible, professional, and zero-cost AR experiences that wow your clients.

We’re excited to announce Lens Studio AI that makes building a Lens as easy as having a conversation.

Just describe what you want, and Lens Studio AI helps you bring it to life. It can write code, guide you step-by-step, generate full Lenses, debug, and even suggest assets. Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned pro, Lens Studio AI meets you where you are to get you from idea to published Lens faster than ever. 

We’re also launching a new framework called Blocks, allowing you to build directly at the platform layer for the first time ever. Blocks are modular, AR-ready components, like scripts, assets, and effects, that come together to build a Lens, all accessible through Lens Studio AI. You can create your own custom, private Blocks, or publish them to share your innovations with the community.

We’re also making sure you can create on the go with the updated Lens Studio Mobile & Web, which now leverages Blocks and includes a powerful chat-based creation tool so you can remix a Lens or create from scratch with a simple AI-powered request.

One year ago, we introduced our fifth-generation Spectacles, a new kind of computer featuring real-time AI-powered experiences that invite people to interact naturally with the world using their hands and voice. 

As we prepare to launch Specs publicly in 2026, we’ve  introduced Snap OS 2.0, which includes a revamped operating system for faster performance, a native browser with WebXR support for immersive experiences, plus a new UI Kit and Mobile Kit to simplify interface design and development.

Everything you’re building today for the current version of Spectacles will be compatible with the new Specs, ensuring your work is future-proof from day one.

We’ve also added new system-level features that make Spectacles more seamless and easy to use. Travel Mode lets you enjoy AR experiences as a passenger on the go, whether you’re in a plane, train, or car, without tracking interruptions, while EyeConnect allows instant setup of shared, co-located Lenses by simply looking at the person next to you.

For developers, we’re unlocking new ways to grow your business with Commerce Kit, enabling select creators to accept payments directly inside Lenses. Whether it’s digital goods or premium features, this marks the beginning of monetization on Spectacles.

On the partner front, we’re excited to announce that the Star Wars: Holocron Histories experience from Industrial Light & Magic, Synth Riders, and Paramount’s Avatar: The Last Airbender are now available on Spectacles. Stay tuned to see more Lens experiences from products like Figma, brands like Tripadvisor, and research from Mastercard coming soon.

Lastly, to power this new era of AR and AI, we’re introducing Snap Cloud, built in partnership with Supabase. Snap Cloud provides developers with instant APIs, edge functions, secure storage, real-time capabilities, and more in their builds. This makes it easy to offload heavy assets and build richer, more dynamic, and privacy-safe projects. From full-length games to immersive, location-based experiences, Snap Cloud represents our long-term commitment to giving you the infrastructure to build world-changing Lenses. 

At Snap, our mission is to make computing more human. With more than a decade of AR innovation, a full augmented reality technology stack, and a global community approaching one billion people on Snapchat, we’re building the platform where creativity scales.

From Lens Studio to Camera Kit, Snap OS to Snap Cloud — and soon, Spectacles — if you can imagine it, you can build it here. We can’t wait to see what you create next.

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