Snap Celebrates 4 Million Lenses and a Decade of AR

• Snap celebrates 400,000 creators and 4 million Lenses over the past 10 years.
• New tools, including ML-powered effects and Lens Studio AI, aim to help more creators develop AR experiences.

In 2015, Snap changed the world by introducing Lenses to its popular social media app, introducing mobile AR to the mainstream. Today, Lenses are used more than 8 billion times every day on Snapchat. At its annual Lens Fest, the camera company celebrated the 400,000 creators who have built over 4 million Lenses over the past decade. It also introduced new tools to help even more creators tap into the power of AR.

Snap Lenses have come a long way since some of the original AR effects like spewing rainbows, especially now that AR lenses are making use of machine learning (ML) to make the experiences higher-fidelity and more personalized. Today, Snap highlighted a series of new tools for its AR development platform, Lens Studio, to let its creators harness the power of AI in their experiences. This includes ML-powered effects that unlock true-to-life fit, texture, and lighting, as well as finer detail and more control of hair and facial geometry. Snap also teased an upcoming AI Clips feature that uses its generative video model to produce image-to-video Lenses.

Creators will also be able to use AI as part of their development workflow. Today, Snap announced Lens Studio AI, a new capability inside Lens Studio that lets creators vibe code Lenses. Now, creators can describe what they want to build, and Lens Studio AI will help bring them to life. Lens Studio AI can write code, guide you step-by-step, generate full Lenses, debug, and even suggest assets. The new AI capability can also be accessed in the web and mobile versions of Lens Studio

Snap also announced that its AR SDK, CameraKit, which allows third-party apps to use its AR camera, is now free with optional Snapchat branding. This change aims to inspire more app developers to integrate CameraKit in apps, web experiences, and AR mirrors.

🌀 Tom's Take:

Snapchat has been one of the most important forces in shaping augmented reality and spatial computing, consistently proving its commitment to advancing the medium. Their investment in AI is not only expanding what is possible for mobile AR but also who can create with it.

Source: Snap