Snapchat Introduces Local Lenses and Other Features

Today, at Snap’s annual developer event, the company announced a series of updates, including Lens voice search, a bring-your-own machine learning model update to Lens Studio and a geography-specific AR system that will turn public Snaps into spatial data that the company can use to three-dimensionally map huge physical spaces. For me, the most interesting bit was a new feature called Local Lenses which will allow Snapchat developers to create geography-specific lenses that interact with a wider swatch of physical locations.

Last year they announced Landmarkers, which allowed developers to create more sophisticated Lenses that leveraged geometric models of popular large landmark structures like the Eiffel Tower, now with this I think it won’t be long before they might allow businesses to create and publish local landmarkers to engage with their audience.

Also, Batman would be proud of his SONAR vision coming to life, imagine the amount of data Snap must be collecting from users’ snaps to compile this 3d data of entire city blocks!!!