Today is the International Day of Friendship, established in 2011 by the UN General Assembly, “with the idea that friendship between peoples, countries, cultures and individuals can inspire peace efforts and build bridges between communities”. On Snapchat, every day can be a celebration of friendship and community. Snapchatters communicate with pictures of themselves or of what they’re doing, and a lot of the time, Lenses are a part of that. With the ability to personalize Snapchat Lenses with the dynamic Friends API, we have seen an abundance of funny and creative Lenses featuring beloved Bitmoji avatars. So we have added even more custom components and other updates that help you create these inherently personal Lenses featuring your friends and family, and your Bitmoji. Let’s take a look at the new features and custom components we added to the Asset Library recently.
3D Bitmoji Stickers
We added the entire catalog of 3D Bitmoji stickers, so you can leverage existing styles and props in parallel with Bitmoji avatars.
3D Bitmoji Head
With this new component, you can easily add a 3D Bitmoji Head onto the user of the Lens, and it dynamically pulls in the Snapchatter’s own avatar and mirrors their facial expressions in real time.
Friends Carousel
The Friends Carousel allows you to easily feature a carousel-view of the Snapchatter’s friends. This way, a Snapchatter can swipe through Bitmoji avatars to choose a friend that best suits the Lens. We also added the UI Carousel custom component, which is a generic version of the same UI shown here.
Updated Friends Component & More
With an update to the Friends component, you can make sure that when a Snapchatter replies with the Lens in a chat, the featured Bitmoji avatars in the Lens are specific to the friend they’re talking to. Talk about relevant! Bitmoji avatars can also render shadows now too. And when you’re building a Lens with the Friends API, instead of seeing a default Bitmoji avatar in the preview screen of Lens Studio, you’ll now see your own avatar's stickers, as long as you’re logged in. Be sure to download the latest Lens Studio release for all the updates.
There’s so many opportunities to make friendship-focused Lenses that promote communication and love between friends on Snapchat. On International Friendship Day, we hope you feel inspired to tell your friends how much they mean to you! Make your own or try sending these 🤗