By Anuj Bhatia
Freelance Augmented Reality (AR) developer and designer Jeethesh Singh was one of the first Indian developers to access Snap’s fifth generation glasses. Snap, owner of Snapchat, aims to speed up the development of AR content for its sights, and to develop engaging AR experiences for young lens creators like Singh.
“I wanted to create unique interactions, so I focused on using both hands to develop new experiences and creating new gestures that are fun and user-friendly. That’s what I did to make this experience. It was the way I started building, then I created a story, and finally, I built a game around it,” said Singh, a Mumbai-based computer engineer.
As Singh explained, Sign of Doom is a first-person shooter game in which the portal is shattered and aliens are overflowing with space. Aliens are trying to film you, and different types of aliens appear at different levels, each with different strengths. When you make an Illuminati sign with your hands, it shoots an explosion of energy. The more points you score, the higher the level you reach. This game is specially designed for snap glasses AR glasses and is set perfectly in 3D space.
Singh said his familiarity with lens studios would help him tackle the challenge of creating AR Games from scratch to scratch. Lens Studio is Snap’s own AR developer tool, and has prior experience developing Snapchat lenses, allowing you to create lenses that place interactive imaginary 3D objects in photos and videos.
The game was developed by Singh with the help of Snap Community members and assisted in the design of the user interface. He said that no coding knowledge is required to develop lenses for Snapchat or AR games like this. According to SNAP, there are over 375,000 lens creators who use lens studios. Lens Studio has built over 4 million lenses over the years.
Augmented reality remains a niche technology, and devices like Spectacles may initially look like sci-fi movie props, but the entire Snap and the Tech industry want it to be mainstream. However, AR glasses are not generally available. These are only available to developers through a $99 subscription. This shows that AR technology still has a long way to go before it matures. However, Snap hopes developers like Singh come up with something creative and completely new that could become the “killer app” they need to shift user behavior from smartphones to AR glasses. We want to quickly develop content suitable for glasses.
