Last week Snap updated Snapchat Lens Studio with new templates that allow creators to take advantage of advanced AR features.
Since Snap launched its Lens Studio almost a year ago, users have created and submitted over 250,000 Lenses that have been viewed over 15 billion times. In Q2 2018 the company announced that over 100,000 Lenses had submitted and accrued over 3.5 billion views, which means that the number of Lenses has more than doubled, while views have quadrupled. To help creators make the most of its Lens Studio, Snap is now bringing new AR features to Lens Studio that were previously only available internally to Snap’s own designers.
The new Segmentation Template allows users to do things like changing a user’s hair into fancy colours, transforming the sky into some other environment, or changing a user’s background into something virtual.
The Marker Tracking template provides Lens Studio creators with image recognition capabilities that are available via ARKit, ARCore, Facebook’s AR platform (now called Spark AR), and other toolkits.
Creators will now also be able to use posters, logos, and other graphics as markers to track animations and 3D content. Snapcodes that are placed near the experience will help users reveal the AR effect. Finally, Lens Studio creators will be able to use the “Add from Camera Roll” template to allow users to the ability to take faces from their camera roll and place it into a Lens scene.
With AR taking centre-stage in Snap’s strategy for 2019, Lens Studio is becoming an increasingly important part of empowering the community to take part in this and unleashing its creativity. As Evan Spiegel, Snap Inc’s CEO recently explained in an internal memo:
[quote]We’re focused on three core building blocks of augmented reality: understanding the world through our Snapchat camera, providing a platform for creators to build AR experiences, and investing in future hardware to transcend the smartphone.”[/quote]
After all, Snap is a “camera company”, right?
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