The company has had success putting its fans to work: users created 95 percent of the geofilters in the app, the company says, making custom designs for cities and neighborhoods around the world. The company says that its team has built more than 3,000 lenses to date, and that one-third of users play with them daily, for an average of three minutes apiece. Google and Apple have introduced AR platforms as well.īut while those companies might have more resources, Snap got off to an early start. Facebook opened up its AR platform to developers on Tuesday, after introducing it at F8 earlier this year. It’s a bid to make Snapchat the default place for flashy, viral AR experiences - think Dancing Hot Dog - at a time when deeper-pocketed rivals are circling.

“This has been an amazing year for AR as a technology.” A scripting API allows users to build additional effects into their designs - tapping an object to change its shape, for example, or altering it as the user walks closer to it. Lens Studio will offer them templates and guides for getting started, for both two- and three-dimensional designs. The move marks the first time that average users - and advertisers - will be able to create AR lenses for Snapchat. “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.” “This has been an amazing year for AR as a technology,” says Eitan Pilipski, who leads Snap’s camera platform team. A flood of new AR objects inside Snapchat could be a creative boon for the app, where 70 million users a day interact with lenses.

The app, which resembles the internal tools Snap uses to build lenses in Snapchat, can be downloaded here.

The company today announced Lens Studio, a design app for Mac and Windows desktop computers. Snap’s second official app is a tool that lets you design and build augmented reality lenses for Snapchat.

Snapchat for mac 2017