Today, we welcomed AR developers from around the world to our sixth annual Lens Fest to celebrate the innovation and creativity of our community, and share new tools for building the next generation of AR experiences. There are now 330,000 developers building on Snap’s AR platform who have created nearly 3.5 million Lenses, which in the last year have been viewed by Snapchatters more than 3 trillion times.
Our mission is to offer this growing AR community the most advanced tools available to build next-generation experiences for the Snapchat community and beyond through Camera Kit and Spectacles. So, we are rebuilding a new version of Lens Studio from the ground up to support more advanced AR development by collaborative teams. Starting today, developers can try Lens Studio 5.0 Beta, which offers several new benefits:
Boosting Productivity: We’ve focused on performance for building more complex AR projects, and now projects load 18x faster.
New AI Capabilities: We teamed up with Open AI to offer a new ChatGPT Remote API. Now, any Lens developer can leverage ChatGPT in their Lenses, unlocking new types of learning, conversational, and creative experiences for Snapchatters. Also, a new 3D face mask generator enables anyone to build their first potentially viral self-expression Lens within a matter of seconds, combining Gen AI and our state-of-the-art face mesh capabilities.
Empowering Team Collaboration: 5.0 Beta also supports version control tools like Git for better project management. Multiple developers will be able work on projects at the same time.
Beyond new tools, we’re continually finding new ways to support developers as they build their business and audience on our platform. Last year we introduced Lenses with Digital Goods so developers could build business models directly into their Lenses. Now, Digital Goods are available to any developer so they can offer exclusive AR features within a Lens that Snapchatters can unlock for a fee. A new section of Lens Explorer will promote Lenses with Digital Goods so they’re easy for Snapchatters to find and try.
We’ve also seen great momentum with our Lens Creator Rewards program which kicked off this summer, offering a monthly reward of up to $7,200 dollars for top-performing Lenses in selection regions. In the first month, more than 45,000 Lenses opted in, generating over 5 billion Lens interactions by Snapchatters.
We’re so excited by the creativity and ingenuity of this community and can’t wait to see what new AR experiences are created through these new tools and capabilities.