Assorted & Noteworthy Snapchat AR Lenses (2018)

SUMMARY:
Just months after Snapchat’s developer tool, Snapchat Lens Studio, was released to the public, one of our for-fun experiments gained major notoriety at the height of the social network’s popularity. Thought Bubble is a groundbreaking customizable Snapchat Lens, being the first Lens on the platform that enabled use of a photo and video texture at the same time in a single experience. The Lens was hand-selected by Snapchat’s internal team to be featured on the platform’s main effect carousel (meaning the effect was visible to all Snapchat users for 24 hours) in April of 2018, at which time Snapchat had an estimated 72,000,000 daily users.

The Thought Bubble Lens works by first taking a photo of subject who you want to animate their thoughts, then you capture the content in the animated bubble itself using a photo or video. The end result is the ability to visually control anyone’s thoughts with humorous or endearing intentions. Without promotion of any kind, our Thought Bubble Snapchat Lens has organically accumulated over 800,000 views, 300,000 plays, and 55,000 shares (and counting) on the platform. While Snapchat was not able to share the performance metrics from having the Thought Bubble Lens featured in the front of the main effect carousel, a conservative 10% usage estimate would equate to over 7,000,000 people having used the Lens within a 24-hour period.

SUMMARY:
In order to push the Snapchat platform to it’s absolute limits, we created Welcome to St. Louis, the first full-featured application built entirely inside of a single Snapchat AR Lens. Our goal was to maximize the amount of content that would fit in a single experience (maximum 4mb file size, 120mb of RAM per Lens), while also creating a St. Louis-themed augmented reality experience that utilized customized portals and face-tracked effects. To put Snapchat’s strict platform limitations in perspective, this total Lens file size is less than a single DSLR photo. However, the huge advantage of this is that you don’t need to download any additional application to access the experience, as it can be loaded instantly within Snapchat.

To begin building the deepest AR experience on the Snapchat platform to date, we first determined that STL Gateway Arch would make the perfect portal door into the world of St. Louis, and thus the concept for this Lens application was born. After countless hours of modeling and texturing each individual element by hand, we optimized each individual photo, texture, and model tens to hundreds of times, freeing up precious kbs of space needed to allocate to other elements. Beyond the Lens application’s self-contained 5 face-tracked AR effects and 11 AR portal locations, Welcome to St. Louis also offers personalization / customization by also letting users pick their own theme color, and customize the portal sign with their own image, or one of the 3 pre-made signs.

Covered by the Riverfront Times: https://www.riverfronttimes.com/artsblog/2018/06/11/st-louis-finally-has-its-own-snapchat-lens

The Welcome to St. Louis Snapchat Lens application contains 2 main AR effects:

FACE-TRACKED AR EFFECTS:
• Toasted Ravs – semi-transparent toasted ravioli glasses in a toothpick frame
• MO.nocle – a Missouri-shaped monocle with mustache and top hat
• Pop The ? – aviator sunglasses that read “WHERE DID YOU GO TO HIGH SCHOOL?” on each lens
• Arch Specs – Gateway Arch-themed glasses
• Fleur-De-Lis – shuttershade-style glasses with a fleur-de-lis in each lens

WORLD AR ARCH PORTAL LOCATIONS:
• The Awakening in Chesterfield
• CCSA at Creve Coeur Lake
• Queeny Park
• Cliff Cave Park
• Great American Human Foosball in Tower Grove South
• Velofix STL in The Grove
• Circus Harmony in City Museum
• Gateway Arch (solar eclipse)
• CityGarden
• Union Station
• Forest Park (balloon race)

OBJECTIVE:
Create a Snapchat AR Lens the newly opened Moustache Cafe in Doha, Qatar to boost the company’s initial social reach, continually increase engagement through organic social sharing of the branded Lens, and play into the young, trendy atmosphere of the cafe (and it’s younger skewing demographic audience).

SOLUTION:
While ShowMeVirtual’s solution to the client’s ask was a fairly simple one, it’s proved to be an extremely effective campaign both at launch and over time. We chose Snapchat as the platform for the client because of their younger, trendy demographic, who are actively encouraged to take photos under the cafe’s giant mustache artworks. Using the Moustache Cafe’s own logo, we created a face-tracked augmented reality Lens that simply attached the logo’s mustache to a user’s face, functional on the front or the back camera. Additionally, because Moustache Cafe caters to both a local and international audience, we included 2 versions of the logo, which can be swapped by tapping anywhere on screen.

Because Moustache Cafe was new to Snapchat, we worked with the management team to provide them with an actionable strategy to maximize reach using the AR Lens. Using the stylized Snapcode we created, Moustache Cafe printed the scannable code out and placed it in a few places around the space, especially near the most photo-op-worthy artworks or areas. With no online promotion of any kind, Moustache Cafe’s Snapchat Lens has accumulated over 450,000 views, 200,000 plays, and 20,000 shares (and counting) achieved organically, solely through in-person visits to the cafe.