Inside Snapchat’s Lens Studio

Every day, tens of millions of people use Snapchat lenses and augmented reality (AR) to adorn themselves with cartoon dog noses, oversize sunglasses, and flower leis.

Thanks to Lens Studio, that world is getting even more animated.

Lens Studio enables you to design and share your own Snapchat lenses with the same tools used by Snapchat’s in-house designers. To date, more than 100,000 lenses have been created and shared on the platform.

Oleksii Kholovchuk is the Snap software engineer responsible for the engineering team behind the app. A native of Ukraine, Kholovchuk started his Silicon Valley career with Looksery, a company that specialized—appropriately enough—in facial-recognition technology. When Looksery was purchased by Snap in 2015, Kholovchuk came along, turning his attention and experience to the then-nascent world of lenses.

Today he and his team aren’t just building lenses but encouraging others to do so, guiding the process of bringing Snap-worthy AR to the masses. We caught up with Kholovchuk, who spoke to us from his California office.

How do you come up with your ideas?
Most times, ideas start with others on my team. They’ll come to me with something new, and we eventually get to a point where we can say, “Yeah, we can bring that to AR. We can let people create that.” When it comes to implementation, it’s all about paper and pencil and doing mockups before we actually start writing code.

Who’s using Lens Studio the most? Experienced designers and modelers, or young people just starting out?
It’s a mix of both. We designed Lens Studio in a way that professional designers, e-commerce designers, and 3D modelers can use it. At the same time, we’ve also found that Lens Studio, AR, and Snapchat are all huge motivators for young people to keep learning. We have some simple templates, and it’s really easy to start creating, doing 3D modeling, and bringing it to life. And when people build lenses that are liked and used by others, they get inspired to learn more.

What were some of your greatest challenges in building Lens Studio?
Probably when we decided everything should be real-time. It’s technically challenging, because it’s harder to mold and render the previews in real time, with no delays. But we clearly understood that the result would be the most compelling to users, so we decided to take the challenge.

What’s some of the most interesting work you’ve seen?
Every day I’m astonished by what people can build, but something that stands out is a pool table that one of our designers built in AR. You can actually play pool! It had balls interacting with each other using real physics laws.

What advice do you have for people starting out with Lens Studio?
Keep experimenting. Lens Studio doesn’t require you to be a highly technical person. What’s special about the lens-creator community is that the most essential thing is creativity. That’s how you unlock and discover the ways people can interact with AR.

Lens Studio

Create & Share AR on Snapchat

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