Snapchat Celebrates Pride Month with New Landmark AR Experiences

Jun 6, 2019 01:00 PM
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While the 49th Annual Gay Pride Parade and Festival will take place on Santa Monica Boulevard and West Hollywood Park, revelers will also be able venture Northeast to the TCL Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard to continue celebrating via Snapchat.

On Thursday, Snapchat launched a Landmarker AR Lens, designed by Los Angeles-based creator Sallia Goldstein, that adorns the iconic theater with Pride decorations for the occasion.

The Capitol Building in Washington, DC will also play host to a Pride-themed Landmarker Lens for this weekend's Capital Pride activities.

Throughout the month, other landmarks that support the AR platform, such as the Flatiron Building in New York City, will gain their own Pride experiences as well.

Snapchat brought the Landmarker AR capability to Lens Studio in April as part of a barrage of AR announcements at its first-ever Snap Partner Summit.

To make the AR dynamic work, Snap's engineers crowdsourced images of famous landmarks submitted via Our Stories to build the 3D model wraps.

"Through the process, we gained the ability to recognize the landmarks with pinpoint precision and understand their geometry, enabling amazing AR experiences that interact with the buildings themselves. We then put these models into Lens Studio so anyone could create AR for the Eiffel Tower or Buckingham Palace," said Qi Pan, computer vision engineer at Snap, in a video explaining the technology.

Despite Facebook copying its every move and the mobile AR toolkits from Apple and Google empowering developers to release their own AR camera apps, Snapchat continues to innovate and bring new ways for users to bring AR magic into the world around them.

Cover image via Snap

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