Snap Inc unveils new AR tools and camera features

Camera company, Snap Inc. today announced at its annual Snap Partner Summit an array of new features across its platform and demonstrated how the AR experiences it has built alongside its partners seamlessly weave into our daily lives, improving the way we live, learn, communicate, and even shop.

What was once a vision for a future with computing overlaid on the world around you, is now reality, and available through the Snap Camera, today.

Alongside new features, Snap announced that Snapchat now reaches over 600 million monthly and more than 332 million daily active users around the world. Snap also now works with over half a million partners, creators, and developers to provide its community with innovative products and services.

Over the past year, Snapchatters have shared content from partners' apps, like songs from Spotify or tweets from Twitter, over 6 billion times on Snapchat. And finally, Snapchat is ranked the #1 happiest platform when compared to other apps.

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Snap’s AR community is building real businesses using Snap’s technology. These developers represent almost every country in the world and have built over 2.5 million Lenses that have been viewed over 5 trillion times. To help support further AR innovation, Snap today introduced features including Lens Cloud.

Lens Cloud is a freely available collection of backend services that vastly expands what developers can build in AR. Storage Services, Location Services, and Multi-User Services will unlock more dynamic, useful, and interactive AR. Features include:

• Storage services: this makes it possible to build complex and interactive Lenses by storing assets in Snap’s cloud, and call on them, on-demand. And, storage is persistent, so Snapchatters can pick up on sessions where they left off last time
• Location services: allows developers to anchor their Lenses into custom locations around the world. Or, they can use Snap’s city templates. The first city is London, and is available right now in Lens Studio. More will be available in the coming year
• Multi-User Services: shared AR across multiple users is possible within the same Lens

Soon, Lens Studio will feature Ray Tracing, making AR elements look even more true to life. With Ray Tracing, it will be possible for reflections to shine from AR objects in a way that's true to life. This is the first time a capability like this is scaling across mobile devices.

Camera Kit has lots of momentum with brands like Samsung, Disney, and Microsoft’s Flipgrid, to developers making an app for the very first time. Samsung used Camera Kit to bring Lenses to the native camera of their Galaxy A Series. Since then, their customers have played with Lenses over 1 billion times and they have committed to bring Snap’s camera into their Galaxy F and M series devices.