Snap took the lid off a number of new products and partnerships for its flagship Snapchat app, alongside new content and originals announcements, at the 2020 Snap Partner Summit.
The new tools and partners run across the Snap Kit, Snap Games and Bitmoji ecosystems, and include new Snapchat Camera and augmented-reality features.
Snap also introduced Snap Minis, a new way for developers to bring app-like, HTML 5-based experiences inside Snapchat while tapping into social features on the app for Android and iOS.
New Snap Minis will include ones developed with Coachella (pictured above), which will let users coordinate and plan their festival lineup with friends, and Movie Tickets by Atom, giving users the ability to find showtimes at a local theater, select the best seats together, and individually pay for tickets to see the show (once theaters reopen, of course).
Another Snap Mini is being developed with Headspace, a provider of meditation and mindfulness content, part of a broader series of new features from Snap aimed at letting users support friends who might be struggling with social and emotional well-being.
Other announcements from the 2020 Snap Partner Summit:
- Camera Kit: A tool that brings Snapchat’s AR capabilities and camera engagement to developers, so that Lenses built using Lens Studio can now live on both their app and on Snapchat. For example, the MLB Ballpark app will let fans interact with their favorite teams and mascots in AR, and celebrate home runs together.
- Dynamic Lenses: New feature that lets developers bring real-time information from their app into Snapchat Lenses. The company is working with partners including Houseparty, Nike, Rally Road, and Yahoo Fantasy Sports.
- Bitmoji for Games: Brings Bitmoji avatars to third-party games on any platform, including mobile, PC and console. Partners’ games using this include “Perfect Master 3D” from Gismart, “Scrabble Go” from Scopely, “SingHeads” from Dream Reality Interactive, “Super Brawl Universe” from Nickelodeon and Playsoft; and “Uno!” from Mattel.
- Snap Games: New slate of first- and third-party games that let friends play games on mobile include “Bitmoji Paint” (Snap Games Studio), “Bumped Out” (Zynga), “Quiz Party” (Mojiworks), “Snow Time” (Funday Factory) and “Super Snappy Bowling” (NOWWA).
- Lens Studio: The developer tool now features SnapML, which lets developers bring their own machine-learning models to power Lenses. Snap has partnered with Wannaby, Prisma, CV2020, and others on their first SnapML creations. In addition, Lens Studio now offers Face Landmarks and Face Expressions for improved facial tracking, new Hand Gesture templates, and an updated user interface to simplify navigation within the tool. Lens Studio is also releasing a foot tracking template powered by an ML model from Wannaby that lets developers easily create Lenses that interact with feet.
- Local Lenses: The company offered a preview of Local Lenses, which enable a persistent, shared AR world built on top of users’ neighborhoods. Snapchatters and their friends will be able to step into this virtual space together to decorate nearby buildings with colorful paint and experience a new dimension of AR.
- Scan partners: Snap announced new Scan partners including PlantSnap, which will let app users identify “90% of all known plants and trees”; Dog Scanner, to recognize almost 400 dog breeds; Yuka, which will launch a Nutrition Scanner to provide a rating on the quality of ingredients in packaged foods by scanning an item’s label; and Louis Vuitton, which will let users scan the fashion brand’s monogram to “be transported into the inspiration behind their latest collection.”
- Voice Scan: Snap is introducing Voice Scan, which lets users issue voice commands to find Lenses. Powered by a partnership with SoundHound, Snapchat users can press and hold on the camera screen to tell Snapchat what kind of Lens to display.
