Snapchat recently introduced a new feature which uses augmented reality (AR) to showcase art from various creative people. You’ve probably seen augmented reality working in Snapchat when you select the dog ears face filter or any other face filter. Now, with Snapchat’s new implementation of AR, you are able to walk around the world and see different creations that creatives have made.
So for example, if you have travelled to Victoria Falls and you were by the waterfalls, you could point your smartphone camera in a certain direction and be able to see a life-sized augmented reality art piece that would have been placed there. Snapchat will be pinning different artworks at different places in major cities around the world.
The way it will work is that Snapchat will create a virtual map that will be identical to the real world map. On that map, they will place these pins which contain the artworks. When you are travelling in the real world and come close to one of those pins, an icon will show up on your screen if you were using Snapchat and you’d be directed to where the artwork is.
As a creator, you can head over to Snapchat’s website, leave your details which should include a link to your artwork portfolio. Snapchat will then take a look at what you’ve done and if they think the stuff is good enough, they will then reproduce it in augmented reality so that they can place it at a location around the world.
So far, art pieces have been placed mostly in America, France and the United Kingdom. Most of the artwork also being showcased is from well-known creatives, however, since it’s still a new thing, there are chances of you as a creative who might be on world status to get featured on the map and have people viewing your art because it’s to Snapchat’s benefit to have as many artworks showing from different countries.
People who have used it already are reporting that it’s not the best implementation as sometimes the app crashes. or the rendering of the augmented reality is not the best quality. These problems are probably due to overloading the smartphone’s process with so much work that it can’t cope.
Given how not everyone has the latest smartphone which might be able to handle the new feature’s processing requirements, this feature might have come too early as very few people will be able to enjoy it. However, it is quite exciting to see companies finding new ways to use the technology available to help us connect or experience different things and Snapchat kinda needs to do this because they’re not doing so well against Instagram which now has 500 million daily active users.
Let us know what you think about this feature. Would you use it? If you’re a creator, would you be interested in applying to having your art showcased through this feature? If you’d like to see a demo of what it looks like in real life, check Snapchat’s promotional video of the new feature down below.
