According to the latest report, Snapchat released an Avatar lens AR filter on Thursday, which makes you look like a Sims character. Or, it lets users know what they look like in the meta-universe. To use this filter, users need to open the camera in the Snapchat app, scan the QR code on the Snapchat website, and then see how smooth their skin is in the meta-universe, where there are obviously no freckles and acne.
A new Snapchat AR filter itself is not compelling, especially when the company fully enters the field of augmented reality – but it is a continuation of a viral trend that has been going on for many years, both good and bad. In August 2020, Snapchat released the Cartoon Face filter, and users realized that they could use it to Disneyize their pets – the hashtag #disneydog then appeared on TikTok and received 40.9 million views. Snapchat released the Cartoon filter in December last year, presenting a more uniform realistic effect for human faces than the previous iteration, and it became popular again.
In June of this year, the company once again launched the Cartoon Style 3D filter, which received 2.8 billion views in the first week after its release. And now, the company has released the Avatar lens AR filter, which also makes users’ clothes look like cartoons, not just their faces. Earlier this month, Snapchat hosted Lens Fest to celebrate the app’s AR technology.
The company announced at the event that there are more than 250,000 filter creators from more than 200 countries. They produced a total of 2.5 million filters, with more than 3.5 trillion views. At the same time, on Snapchat’s TikTok clone Spotlight, the app provided a total of $250 million in rewards for the posts of 12,000 creators. The company said that more than 65% of Spotlight works use a Snapchat creative tool or filter.
Companies like Niantic and Snapchat believe that augmented reality is better than virtual reality for building a meta-universe. Startups like Ready Player Me, Spatial, and Genies are emerging to help users create their virtual characters. But in augmented reality, the premise is to change the real world in a way that helps users participate more deeply.