Augmented reality enhances the Snapchat community’s relationships with their friends, families, and the world. With more than 250 million people engaging with AR every day on Snapchat, AR has become a widely accessible, useful tool for our community’s daily lives – helping people to express themselves, communicate, play, shop, learn, and more.
With the powerful and intuitive tools of our Snap AR platform, creators, developers, and teams are building polished AR experiences that are valuable for Snapchatters, all while building their businesses.
Today, we’re introducing three advanced new Snapchat Lenses built by teams from the Snap AR community – SEEN Camera, Unconditional Friends, and Brickit Express.
Lens: SEEN Camera
Built by: SEEN.TV, in consultation with Modem
SEEN Camera empowers people to tell and share their stories to create a positive impact on the world. It’s a new way to tell your story in one minute, and it’s now available on Snapchat.
The SEEN Camera Lens offers a set of journalism and filmmaking tools such as topic prompts, interview questions, shot lists and immersive AR effects, and guides Snapchatters step-by-step through the storytelling process. The Lens offers multiple storytelling templates that will update regularly, empowering people to share their perspective on current events or global social and environmental issues.
Snapchatters can publish their Snaps made with SEEN Camera to Spotlight or send their Snaps to friends, Groups, or Stories of their choice.
This Lens was designed and built by SEEN.TV, a journalism video publisher with over 7 million subscribers on Snapchat. The innovative Lens user experience (UX) was created in consultation with Modem.
Lens: Unconditional Friends
Built by: 3dar Studios
Unconditional Friends is a magical challenge-based game where friends compete to collect rewards, score points and earn the top spot in the match.
Players place an enchanted portal on a real-world surface through the Snapchat Camera. Racing against the clock, players slice the “Unconditional Friends” that emerge from the portal and collect flowers to score points.
This game can be played in real time with a friend, whether they’re in the same room or across the world. Through Multi-User Services within Lens Cloud, friends can connect together in the same Lens at the same time or play in solo mode.
Unconditional Friends was created by 3dar, a creative studio that merges art and technology to create new worlds of wonder.
Lens: Brickit Express
Built by: Brickit Inc., in collaboration with Qreal
Brickit is a mobile app that scans a pile of bricks, identifies individual pieces, provides ideas of what to build, and lets you share what you make.
Now, the Brickit team is tapping into the power of AR with Brickit Express, a new Lens that combines digital and physical play. Through the Snapchat camera, our community can discover new creations, get step-by-step instructions to build with their bricks, and now, immerse their physical creations in AR scenes.
Brickit Express leverages several key capabilities in Lens Studio. First, the Lens uses SnapML to integrate Brickit’s custom-built ML model, letting Snapchatters scan a pile of bricks, identify pieces, and suggest ideas for what can be built. It also taps into Storage Services within Lens Cloud to generate dozens of 3D character models and scenes that are possible with the bricks on hand. And soon, Brickit Express will offer premium 3D character models and scenes that Snapchatters can unlock with Snap Tokens.
Brickit collaborated with Qreal, an agency focused on building realistic 3D content optimized for AR, to build this new Lens.
Introducing the Snap AR Learning Hub
Today, we’re also introducing the Snap AR Learning Hub, a new way to learn about the augmented reality field and gain the skills for a career in AR. For beginners who want to learn the foundations of creating AR in Lens Studio, we’re offering a new set of courses with more than a dozen free lessons. The Learning Hub also includes tutorials, livestreams, and documentation to help intermediate and advanced creators.
We’re dedicated to supporting our AR community, and together, we’re driven to bring people the most advanced and useful AR experiences possible.