Snap Co-Founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy opened our seventh annual developer conference with a keynote Q&A sharing their vision for the future of Snap, AR, and Spectacles — Snap’s fifth-generation standalone AR glasses powered by Snap OS. Next up, we heard from Daniel Wagner as he gave us an in-depth look at Spectacles ‘24. We announced the winners of the annual Lens Fest Awards, went in depth about how Snap AR and AI are woven together through a variety of native Lens Studio features, and heard from Lens Creators on ways you can grow your career. We ended the conference with a Lensathon with 80 developers from around the world. In teams, they had 24 hours to build experiences for the new Spectacles and compete for $15,000 in cash prizes. Watch all the excitement here!
This year’s events were nothing short of inspiring, and we hope the latest features we’ve added in Lens Studio are exciting to you too. Not only did we add features helpful for Spectacles development like Spectacles Interaction Kit, Spectacles Monitor, Real Time Scene Inspection, and support for TypeScript, but we also announced new features added to the GenAI Suite, new animation tooling, and a highly requested API. Let’s take a deeper look at Lens Studio version 5.1.
Tap into trends
Browse the various tags of the month now on the Lens Studio home screen! Select the tag you want to apply, once selected it will be highlighted in yellow, and you can open your new project with these tags already applied.
Build social Lenses that Snapchatters want to share
Snapchatters love responding and engaging with friends’ stories through Lenses. We’re expanding on this ‘prompt and response’ format to include images with the new Dynamic Response custom component and template. This lets Lens Creators build asynchronous games, visual polls, and even shared meme-builders.
Other Lenses that Snapchatters love to share are ones that encourage friendly competition. We’ve introduced the Leaderboard API, which allows your Lens to keep track of scores achieved by Snapchatters playing your game. Your Lens can then display the scores compared with their friends who have played the same game. Challenge accepted!
Bring a character to life from head to toe
With a text prompt, you can now generate complete characters, fully rigged and ready for full body AR. Create a range of characters from wizards to football players or futuristic space warriors with Body Morph in the GenAI Suite.
Animate Bitmoji avatars with ease
Have even more fun with Bitmoji avatars in your Lenses by browsing hundreds of high-quality animations you can choose from in the GenAI Suite. And, when adding multiple animations to a project, you can now merge them, thanks to GenAI, transitioning seamlessly from one to the next. Plus, generative animation retargeting improves the look of Bitmoji avatars with different shapes, sizes, and clothing—automatically.
Reach more Snapchatters with an icon
Lens icons are critical to Lens discovery, as ranking on Snapchat favors Lenses with icons. Plus, your Lens can’t be featured in the Carousel without an icon! Now, you can quickly complete that last step before publishing your Lens by generating an icon with a text prompt in Lens Studio. Learn more here.
We’re excited for you to dive into Lens Studio 5.1 and start creating! Download now.