Despite Pokemon Go’s continuing (and to me, slightly baffling) success, I’ve long been much more bullish on Snap than Niantic for location-based AR. That’s in part because of their very cool world lens tech, which they’ve been rolling out more widely. Now they’re opening up the creation flow:
“In 2019, we started with templates of 30 beloved sites around the world which creators could build upon called Landmarkers… Today, we’re launching Custom Landmarkers in Lens Studio, letting creators anchor Lenses to local places they care about to tell richer stories about their communities through AR.”
Interesting stats:
At its Lens Fest event, the company announced that 250,000 lens creators from more than 200 countries have made 2.5 million lenses that have been viewed more than 3.5 trillion times. Meanwhile, on Snapchat’s TikTok clone Spotlight, the app awarded 12,000 creators a total of $250 million for their posts. The company says that more than 65% of Spotlight submissions use one of Snapchat’s creative tools or lenses.
On a related note, Disney is now using the same core tech to enable group AR annotation of the Cinderella Castle. Seems a touch elaborate:
- Park photographer takes your pic
- That pic ends up in your Disney app
- You point that app at the castle
- You see your pic on the castle
- You then take a pic of your pic on the castle… #YoDawg
