Newsletter #24

The greatest Snapchat lens

I was perusing the entries to the Spotlight Lensathon and came across one of the greatest Snapchat lenses I've ever seen. Action Loop is a super cool lens that records your 3D motion and creates a digital twin. It's a very ingenious lens both from a user perspective and also from a technical perspective. This lens deserves to be in the top three. Go check it out and give Vishal a follow.

Effect House - slowly growing on me

I've yet to really dive into Effect House because it is still pretty clunky, but it is slowly growing on me. It is plenty adequate to make filters that go viral, but my fear is that they'll get too complacent. Spark AR feels super stagnant, but Instagram has a billion users so people are going to build for IG. TikTok is in the same boat as IG in that regard - lots of users and the software works good enough for creators to use. Hopefully they'll keep the features coming though. I do wish they would setup a publicly-searchable forum. Right now they are keeping everything in Discord which I'm not a big fan of.

Spark AR

I jumped back into Spark AR this past week for a client project and it was the same as the last time I used it. Nothing groundbreaking and of course lots of issues while trying to test with the client.