Among the several announcements made at today’s Snap Partner Summit was a new camera & augmented reality (AR) experience for developers, creators, & Snapchatters.
According to Snap, about 170 million Snapchatters engage with AR daily — nearly 30 times every day. Snapchatters use “Lenses” for this.
At its very base is Lens Studio, is a free desktop application designed for developers & artists to build & distribute AR on Snapchat. Today, Snap announced at the summit that it was updating Lens Studio, adding advanced features “to push the boundaries of AR creation.”
Today, we’re introducing SnapML, which lets any developer bring their own machine learning models directly into Lens Studio to power Lenses. Now, anyone can create their own Lenses with neural networks, expanding the possibilities for Lenses that can transform the world. We partnered with Wannaby, Prisma, CV2020, & Official Lens Creators on the 1st SnapML creations.
– Snap
Local Lenses
Local Lenses enable a persistent, shared AR world built right on top of your neighborhood. It will help users & their friends to step into augmented reality together to decorate nearby buildings with colorful paint & experience a new dimension of AR.
All that users have to do is to “Press & hold” on the camera screen to unlock relevant, helpful Lenses based on what they see in front of them.
Snap also announced new Scan partners today:
- Snapchatters can identify 90% of all known plants and trees thanks to PlantSnap.
- The Snapchat camera now recognizes almost 400 breeds powered by Dog Scanner. It works on people too, so you can even figure out what type of dog you most resemble!
- Soon, you can Scan the iconic Louis Vuitton monogram to be transported to a virtual installation displaying their classic trunks and latest collection.
- Later this year, Nutrition Scanner will give a rating on the quality of ingredients in many packaged foods when you Scan an item’s label thanks to Yuka.
Also introduced today was Voice Scan, which offers Lens results based on a user’s voice commands. Voice Scan is powered by a partnership with SoundHound. All that users have to do to use this is press & hold to tell Snapchat what kind of Lens they want to see.
via: Snap
For more on Lens Studio announcement, click here.
Image credit: Snap
