With plenty of impressive stats and a swathe of new tech to unveil, the Snap Partner Summit delivered plenty of updates for the future of the app.
Running under the slogan ‘Back to Reality’, Snap’s summit was focused primarily on Augmented Realiy (AR) and the applications of it both within Snapchat an elsewhere, and also introduced a number of upcoming camera features planned.
The summit, led by keynote speakers Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, revealed that Snapchat currently sees over 600 million monthly users, and works with over half a million partners and creators to provide products and services to the platform’s users.
In the realms of AR, the most popular use at present on Snapchat is their AR shopping lens, which allows users to browse through various catalogues of clothes and outfits.
Since January last year, the shopping lens has been used by over 250 million Snapchatters.
Looking to the future, Snap is preparing a number of pieces of tech designed to help brands deliver to customers through the medium of AR, such as the Snap 3D Asset Manager, which will allow brands to manage and optomise 3D models for any product in their catalogue.
You can also look forward to a new AI-powered shopping lens which will allow you to try on clothes using the power of AR without ever having to change.
In the realms of camera tech, Snap announced the introduction of Lens Cloud, a freely available collection of backend services which will unlock more dynamic, useful, and interactive AR.
There are also plans to introduce storage services and ray tracing to the app.
Finally, if you’re a fan of live music, Snap announced a partnership with Live Nation to create an immersive AR-based experience through the Snapchat app.
