With the introduction of their most recent generative AI technology, Snapchat, the well-known social media platform owned by Snap, is advancing its augmented reality (AR) capabilities. When users use the phone cameras to record themselves, this ground-breaking innovation will enable them to enjoy more realistic and immersive special effects.
Overlaying digital effects on real-world pictures is a field in which Snap has long been a pioneer. The business is hoping that these improved special effects, dubbed lenses, would draw more users and advertisers to Snapchat even though it is still smaller than industry titans like Meta.
With the release of the new AI-powered lenses, AR developers will be able to produce more intricate and whimsical experiences that users of Snapchat may integrate into their content.
The developer program Lens Studio, which gives programmers and artists the means to create augmented reality features for other websites and applications in addition to Snapchat, has also seen a significant update from Snap.
The chief technical officer of Snap, Bobby Murphy, emphasized the major enhancements in Lens Studio, saying, “What’s fun for us is that these tools both stretch the creative space in which people can work, but they’re also easy to use, so newcomers can build something unique very quickly.”
There is now an AI assistant to respond to developer inquiries as part of the expanded Lens Studio’s generative AI toolkit. Moreover, a new technology does the heavy lifting of manual modeling by allowing artists to create 3D graphics straight from text prompts.
With this development, augmented reality technology has advanced significantly. Only basic effects, like adding a hat to a video, could be handled by earlier versions. The hat can now move in sync with the wearer’s head and adjust to the illumination in the video thanks to engineers’ new AI-powered tools that enable them to make more realistic optics.
In order to produce realistic clothing and other effects—which have proven to be extremely difficult to execute up until now—Snap is also investigating full-body augmented reality experiences.