World Lenses – Snapchat’s Incarnation into Augmented Reality

Another jolly news for Snapchat junkies—a bunch of live digital filters called World Lenses have been added that can be used along with your rear camera of your smartphone. World Lenses let you overlay rainbows, clouds and other 3D experiences on the world rather than on your face.

We’re already familiar with those puppy face, creepy facials filters but this is one big step towards augmented reality. It allows you to place 3D lenses on the screen, with which you can actually walk around with your smartphone’s camera.

Augmented Reality v/s Virtual Reality

Well, people often have some misconceptions between the term Augmented reality and virtual Reality.  Both are earning a lot of media attention and are promising a tremendous growth. Virtual reality is more like recreation of a real-life environment or situation whereas AR makes an existing reality more meaningful by giving us an ability to interact with it.

One Big Step Towards AR

This is surely one big step towards augmented reality. Now, users can turn the lens on the outside world and add 3D text, see puking rainbow clouds or funky coffee mugs and any other number of other cool effects. Snapchat’s parent company Snap Inc has been working on AR for some time. First, they rolled out lens filters like adding puppy dog ears to your selfies or the creepy/hilarious face swap.

The second was Spectacles, sunglasses with a video camera that snap 10-second clips for use with Snapchat.

How to Use World Lenses on your Snapchat

Here’s a small quickie that you need to do:

1. Open Snapchat, Duh!
2. Now tap anywhere on the screen when using the rear camera, to get a range of objects you can place like rainbows, clouds or any whacky object of your choice.
3. Place the item down and walk around with them or leave them hovering in the picture.
4. Get ready to have fun! For Starters, place these over your friend’s head 😉

You May Also Like: Clash of Instant Messaging Titans: WhatsApp v/s Snapchat

The good news is that these world lenses will be updated on a daily basis, allowing you to have more fun with your Snap account.

Check out the new features below in this small introductory video, and don’t forget to drop your feedback about how much you like it!

Happy Snapping!