Hot Dog! You Can Now Make AR Lenses for Snapchat in Lens Studio

Snapchat’s parent company Snap, Inc. just announced that you can now create your own Augmented Reality Lenses for SnapChat.

Top image via Snap Inc. 

Snap Inc just announced Lens Studio, a new augmented reality tool for creating Snapchat AR characters.

Lens Studio is a free desktop app for Mac and Windows users. It uses a series of guides to help creators and developers build original characters in either 2D or 3D.

After creating a Lens, users will get an original Snapcode to share with friends or customers. The Snapcode will allow users to unlock your Lens for 24 hours.

This tool comes after the highly successful Geofilters campaign, which let users create filters for cities, businesses, events, and more.

Brands will likely be the ones most excited about the new tools, and Engadget has previoulsy said the following:

Snap is opening up its 3D World Lenses to advertisers. So far, it has partnered with Warner Bros. and Bud Light to create Lenses featuring the Blade Runner “Spinner” car and a Bud Light vendor.

Snapchat introduced the ability to add 3D objects into an image in April, and 3D Bitmoji followed earlier this month. Today’s announcement brings these AR capabilities to advertisers who can offer them nationally, targeted by age, gender or interest or via a swipe-up attachment to a regular ad. And with users snapping over three billion times a day, snap-based advertisements stand to be seen quite a lot. —Engadget

Snap has already uploaded a series of tutorials to their Lens Studio YouTube channel. You can get started by downloading the Lens Studio app for Windows or Mac and testing out any of the following tutorials.

Make an Animated Object Lens for Snapchat

Make a Look Around Template Lens for Snapchat

Window Template Lens for Snapchat

You can watch all of the tutorials on the Lens Studio YouTube page.