Lens Fest 2022: Celebrating Five Years of Innovation, Creativity & Technology powered by Snap’s Growing AR Community

Lens Fest 2022 – Indian AR developers Vishal Yadav and Wasim Ghole won Lens Fest Awards for their advanced AR experiences, capturing the limelight in the global conference 

Augmented reality is already enhancing daily life at an incredible global scale today. 363 million people use our Snapchat camera technology every day on average to talk with their friends and family, try on new looks, or learn something new about the world around them. Snapchatters engage with AR experiences an average of 6 billion times per day, evolving the way we use computing in our daily lives. 

AR creators, developers, and partners are tapping into our community’s engagement and excitement about augmented reality today and its vast potential for the future. Today we announced that there are over 300,000 creators, developers and teams from around the world who’ve built more than 3 million AR Lenses.  

Today we announced the winners of the Lens Fest Awards, celebrating the year’s most creative and innovative Lenses. Snap’s panel of experts reviewed hundreds of entries from around the world across five categories: Fashion, Play, Education, Wellness, and Moonshot. Two talented AR creators from India, Vishal Yadav from Bangalore and Wasim Ghole from Mumbai, have been named as Lens Fest Award winners. 

Vishal Yadav, a talented student from the National Institute of Design, developed the Flux Fashion Lens which captures colors from your surroundings to create an outfit. Coming from an XR designer background, he has been creating lenses for Snapchat for two years. “Lens Studio allows a creator to push their boundaries of innovation and publish Lenses for free on the platform. Being a part of Lens Fest makes me feel recognized in the community and allows me to experience firsthand how other creators like me are enhancing people’s realities on the back of AR. The Flux Fashion lens allows users to grab colors from the surroundings, wear those colors as a dress, and if they wish they can share it with their friends. The lens starts with instructions to tap and hold color which brings in the eyedropper tool to grab any color from the surrounding. Once a custom choice of colours have been picked, the camera can be pointed at someone, who can then try-on this dress. The dress is made of flowing particles that interact and bounces off the ground and create a trail wherever the person wearing the dress goes.” said Vishal, sharing his experience of being a part of Lens Fest and creating an award-winning lens. 

Wasim Ghole, a talented young AR creator, developed the Soft Drink Info Lens which spotlights information about the drink. “Snapchat introduced me to the concept of AR and gave me a holistic perspective of how Snap’s AR was able to capture memories like never before. The tutorials and templates in Lens Studio helped me gain a better understanding and gave me the confidence to push my creative boundaries. I believe that the possibilities with AR are endless, and it can be used in several ways to serve humanity in the best way. My lens Soft Drink Info helps users to have a track of the nutritional facts in some of the popular soft drinks in the market. As health and fitness are some of the most important aspects of our life, I wanted to create something that will educate them about the soft drinks they consume in their daily life. The lens not only makes the user aware of the nutritional count in the soft drink but also calculates the duration of different physical activities or exercises like running, cycling and cleaning, one can engage in to burn those calories.”, said Wasim while talking about his love for AR and his AR lens – Soft Drink Info. 

Explore the lenses created by Vishal and Wasim here: 

  Flux Fashion by Vishal          Soft Drink Info by Wasim 

Snap is committed to democratizing the ability to use and create AR experiences and efforts in line with this vision have resulted in Snap’s Indian AR creator community, growing by 60% in 2022.  

Lenses created by Snap’s AR community in India 

                     Learn Tamil Lens        Holi Lens            Vasant Panchami Lens 

Building Businesses with Snap AR  

With hundreds of millions of people using AR on Snapchat daily, AR developers are building strong businesses on the Snap AR platform. Lens Creator Pradeepa Anandhi created a unique custom landmarker lens for Havmor, an ice-cream brand popular across majority Indian households. Additionally, in a first ever, Community Lenses were featured on Snapchat Maps in India making the Holi experience an even more colourful one. Snapchatters were able to activate Holi special Lenses created by the Snapchat Lens Network community members on Snap Maps directly. To celebrate Diwali 2022, Snapchat collaborated with 5 lens creators, Tanishqua Sattiraju from Hyderabad, Gayathri Shri from Chennai, Interactive Realities from Mumbai, Adhil Suresh from Cochin and Jagmeet Singh from Amritsar, where they gave the local sweet shops in their cities a unique AR festive makeover.  

Havmor Paradise Lens by Pradeepa Anandhi  

Diwali Makeover lens for Nice Bake N Cool Bar in Cochin by Adhil Suresh 

Innovating with Snap AR  

We share technology in development with our AR community to push the boundaries of AR further, faster – we believe that AR is more impactful when the tools are in the hands of creative people across the globe.  

Over the past five years, we’ve taken the most innovative machine learning and computer vision technologies developed by our team, made these tools adaptable for a wide range of use cases, and wrapped them in an intuitive interface through Lens Studio. AR experiences are created and published in Lens Studio so that people can use them on Snapchat, in other apps through Camera Kit, or on our AR glasses, Spectacles.  

AR is core to the Snapchat experience today, and over time, we see even greater opportunities for hardware to bring it to a new dimension. Our ambition is that AR can be even more natural through lightweight glasses, letting you use your hands to interact with AR in the world, and prioritizing the real people and places around you over a pixelated version of them.  

The advanced hardware and software, distribution channels, and ways we support growth through the Snap AR platform all work together to fuel the creativity and businesses of our global AR community. With so much attention on the future of immersive computing, we’re thrilled to celebrate those who are driving AR forward today.