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Building Social Lenses: New Friends API Powers Personalized Experiences

Lenses are an inherently personal experience because AR involves overlaying computing onto your camera’s perspective, whether it’s on your face or applied to the world around you. More than 300M Snapchatters engage with AR experiences on our platform every day, on average. We believe these experiences are so frequent because of how personalized and fun AR experiences can be. To make AR even more personalized and fun, we’re adding the Friends API to the latest version of Lens Studio 5.0 Beta.

Personalize Lenses With Dynamic Friend Info

The Friends API enables you to add a variety of attributes from a Snapchatter’s friend list into your Lens concept. So how does this look in practice? Now, you can create Lenses that feel customized for each individual Snapchatter by featuring the friends they’re connected with in the actual Lens content. For example, have Snapchatters choose “who’s more likely to…” with a quiz using their friends’ Bitmojis. Or pick which friends you’d feature in a rom-com movie using a randomizer game.

Not only can you pull in friends’ Bitmojis, you can also feature dynamic content like birthdays, zodiac signs, Snapstreaks, and more. Snapchat will continue to respect our users’ privacy settings and only include information OK’d by the users themselves! In the Asset Library you’ll find the Friends custom component & a few new templates, alongside a tutorial on our YouTube channel to help get you started on creating these super fun and engaging Lenses.   

Last year, we shared that 85% of Gen Z have a Bitmoji and over 250 million people use Bitmojis every day — which is why we’re so excited for you to take advantage of the Friends API to unlock Bitmojis in your Lenses. We’re updating the rigs in Lens Studio to make animating Bitmojis much easier, and with new Animation tools now in Lens Studio, you can apply existing animations in a Lens to Bitmoji models downloaded at runtime.

Introducing New Animation Tools

The new Animation tools make it possible to manage and edit imported animations — bringing an industry standard user experience into Lens Studio. Connect animations and humanoid models from two separate imports, or simplify the playback of imported animations — adjusting starting and ending points, blend mode, looping behavior, etc. This foundation is just the beginning of animation tooling to come in Lens Studio.

As always, we’re excited to see what you create! Download Lens Studio 5.0.10 Beta. 

Note: Snapchat will continue to respect our users’ privacy settings and only include information OK’d by the users themselves. Bitmojis can only be leveraged if the Snapchatter already has one. Bimojis cannot be used in an Ad unless you’re working with Snap.