Snapchat recently held its 6th annual Snap Partner Summit, where key leaders from across the business shared news for its community of Snapchatters, creators, developers, partners, and advertisers.
The event focused on how the real connection and creativity happening on Snapchat make everyday lives better.
Next generation of Spectacles powered by Snap OS
Snap is introducing the fifth generation of Spectacles, its see-through, standalone AR glasses that enable Snapchatters to use Lenses and experience the world together with friends in new ways.
Spectacles are powered by the new Snap operating system (OS) designed to enhance how people naturally interact with the world. Easily navigate Snap OS using hands and voice.
Snap OS leverages proprietary technologyincluding Liquid Crystal on Silicon (LCoS) micro-projectors and waveguides, creating vivid, sharp images both indoors and outdoors.
With two Snapdragon processors from Qualcomm, the dual system on-a-chip architecture splits the compute workload across the two processors, which enables more immersive experiences while reducing power consumption and improving heat dissipation. Spectacles deliver up to 45 minutes of continuous standalone runtime.
Snap is partnering with OpenAI to give developers access to multimodal large language models to easily build Lenses that recognise objects and provide more context. To start, Snap is introducing Spectacles with no developer tax, and launching new ways to build and share Lenses.
The newly rebuilt Lens Studio 5.0 lets developers quickly push their project to Spectacles. With Snap’s new Spectacles Interaction Kit, build intuitive Lenses without having to develop an interaction system from scratch.
New AI features in-app
Over 850 million people around the world use Snapchat, including three out of four 13-34 year olds in over 25 countries and roughly eight out of 10 Snapchatters are over the age of 18.
New AI features include new AI Lens that allows Snapchatters to see their ‘elderly selves’, AI in Snapchat Memories for Snapchat+ subscribers to access creative AI captions and Lenses applied to their Memories, plus new AI Snaps to share with friends.
My AI is now even better at problem solving with Snaps like interpreting complex parking signs, translating menus in a foreign language, identifying unique plants, and more.
AR Platform news
More than 375,000 AR creators, developers, and teams from nearly every country in the world have built over four million Lenses. In just the last year, Snapchatters have engaged with Lenses made by Snap’s AR community more than 4.5 trillion times.
Snap rebuilt Lens Studio from the ground up so that AR developers and teams can build more robust, advanced AR experiences together. AR experiences built in Lens Studio can be published to Snapchat, partners’ apps and websites, and to our AR glasses Spectacles.
AR creation is now more approachable with Snap’s new Easy Lens. This new tool makes it possible to build Lenses in minutes just by typing what to create. Through a chat interface, Easy Lens uses large language models to connect with Lens Studio components and builds Lenses.
Snap is also rolling out new GenAI Suite features in Lens Studio to make it faster and easier to bring creativity to life. AR creators will find new tools including Animation Blending, Body Morph, and Icon Generation, and soon, it will be possible to generate animations through text descriptions, along with support for Video to 3D Gaussian Splats.
Creator news
The number of creators posting publicly has more than tripled over the past year. Creators have garnered trillions of views on the Snaps in their Stories, and now, more than 500 million people watch Spotlight videos.
A new simplified profile design allows Snapchatters 16 and older to easily toggle between personal and public accounts. If they want to connect with their real friends – personal – and if they choose to reach a wider audience – public.
Pin favourite Snaps to the top of a Public Profile, use Templates to create and share Snaps, and use Replies to turn messages into a photo and video response.
Through Snap’s preferred partners and new self-serve tools, creators can now choose to show off their engagement and demographic data to brands when they’re part of the Snap Star Collab Studio, a program that helps accelerate creator and brand partnerships.
Partner news
Today, over 300 million Snapchatters engage with augmented reality (AR) every day on average.
Snapchat has partnered to bring Snapchat Cam to more than 50 venues, teams, artists, and broadcast partners, like the Indiana Fever at Gainbridge Fieldhouse and the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden. We
Snap launched a new Lip Syncing Lens with Eminem in celebration of his new song Fuel. Soon this visual Lens experience will support thousands of tracks from Snapchat Sounds library.
Snap is alsointroducing an advanced version of the NYX Beauty Bestie Lens that uses generative AI to recommend endless looks tailored to Snapchatters’ unique features, making mastering a handful of looks fun and easy to share with friends in a Snap.