Snapchat’s New ‘Lens Studio’ Lets Businesses Create Branded AR Effects
Chris Harper — December 21, 2017 — December 21, 2017
Snap Inc. has just introduced a new application called ‘Lens Studio’ for designers and creatives to build their own augmented reality lenses for Snapchat.
Lens Studio is currently available for Mac and Windows desktop computers. The app is a reflection of Snap’s internal tools used to build its own lenses in Snapchat, giving anybody with a computer the power to build augmented reality experiences.
Augmented Reality (AR) has seen a rapid increase in innovation and commercial distribution over the last few years with companies like Facebook, Google, Apple, and Snapchat leading the way on the software and hardware distribution. Now, with Lens Studio, anybody can bring their doodles to life with little-to-no AR experience.
“This has been an amazing year for AR as a technology,” says Eitan Pilipski, who leads Snap’s camera platform team. “We’re really excited to take this tool, and make it as simple as possible for any creator out there to have a presence on Snapchat.”
Why is this important for brands?
The application’s democratizing of the AR experience in Snapchat is not only beneficial to the average user, but also to brands who want to get in front of Snapchat’s 70 million daily active lens users. The barrier to entry for brands to become creatives within a platform mostly controlled by millennials allows these brands to incorporate advertising while still “speaking the Snapchat language” and avoiding being spammy or intrusive.
What should we expect?
Snap likes to consider itself a “camera company,” and not a social media company. This is a bold decision by Snap, but a smart one. Cameras have become a necessity in modern culture as a way to capture, save, and share memories. Snapchat wants to be the go-to solution for your life camera, in whatever form that takes. Soon, cameras will evolve and be more personal. We are already seeing this with the introduction of things like Snap Spectacles.
Snapchat
Snapchat wants to be the pioneer as the world becomes more dependent on cameras and AR. With this in mind, along with its continued investment in democratizing the AR experience, we can only assume the future will hold creative experiences that combine a fun and interactive experience (along with a Coca-Cola label attached to it).
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