Part of your world
Snapchat has expanded their unique combination of reality and fantasy with new filters. Not for your face this time, but for your reality.
With the new update, you can use your non-selfie camera and tap the screen to add World Lenses, augmenting your reality with rainbow-vomiting clouds, shooting hearts, snow, and golden butterflies. Some of the filters work in both outward and self-ward directions.
The filters work like the facial ones. It calibrates the camera and then ads a bit of AR magic. Like sticking stickers to your video, you can move your phone around without moving the filters.
Prepping for Spectacles
Just like when Pokemon Go was cool for a week, I am amazed how much fun even simple AR technology can be. It’s really entertaining to make it snow inside a coffee shop and look around at everyone sitting around, not caring that I’ve magically transported them all into a scene from Frozen.
I also may or may not have secretly shot hearts at several baristas. The new filters require you to know they exist to use them, so if you hurry you can be on the cutting snappy edge and amaze all your online friends.
A new page is also available in the list of features under ‘Memories” called “Spectacles,” which indicates that the video-recording sunglasses will drop soon, although the website still doesn’t have a firm date announced.
Obviously these two things will probably work together, which means not only can you add cartoon fun to your short Spectacle snaps, but maybe that this will be the true beginning to AR IRL.
As far as I can tell, there would be nothing preventing me from walking around with literal rose colored glasses making the world more surreal. I predict this combination of simple features and hip wearable will make hyper reality closer to a real than things like Google Glass ever could.
On what is a gloomy post-election week for many, maybe we could all use some rainbow barfing clouds overlaid on our world.
And PS: holler if you see one of the “Snapbots” that is surprising random cities around the nation for being parked in a spot for a day to sell Spectacles early.
— Spectacles (@Spectacles) November 10, 2016
