Just a few days ago Snapchat released Lens Studio allowing developers and 3D artists the ability create and deploy their own AR lenses. Today I sat down and had a crack at it and built my first Snap Chat lens – a very simple space scene inspired by perspective street art.

Len’s Studio is a bare-bones IDE with a lightweight javascript based scripting language and a familiar component-based GUI. All code is bound to scene objects through a small set of events and allow the developer access to touch interactions, camera position, animation controls, and reasonable API access to necessary components.

At the moment the developer tools only support surface (Horizontal) based AR and, unlike Facebooks AR Studio, does not support face tracking. Snap Chat is also extremely restrictive in terms of memory footprint, poly count, and file size. With these, and other limitations such as lack of network access, this is not a platform to distribute complex AR apps – it’s geared for quick, fun, sticker-like animations. What I love most about Lens Studio is how easy it is to actually deploy. For me, that was just clicking a Submit button and waiting for a review process that returned a live snap code in less than 30 mins.