It’s well known from media reports that Snap Inc is currently looking at Augmented Reality to be heavily featured in its next major product release. Already Snapchat has pioneered in the AR space with it’s AR filters which are, arguably, one of its killer feature on the platform.
Moreover, it instrumentally led Facebook to its aquisition of MSQRD (a facial recognition/AR filters company). Facebook’s subsequent and aggressive response to the rise in popularity on the Snapchat platform has resulted in the company launching its own story-like applications on Instagram, Whatsapp, Messenger and with Facebook in the pipeline.
So what might Snapchat decide to do next?
I have come up with a concept that I entitle Octi. I believe that Snap needs an entity very much like the Google Assistant, Cortana or Siri that users can talk to with queries albeit with the addition of an AR perspective. The most similar application currently on the market would be Google’s Lens which hasn't been tightly integrated with the Google Assistant — as of yet!
Snap’s next step would be either aquiring AR talent or aquiring small startups/products based on visual recognition, voice recognition (unless they intend to tap into some parties API — perhaps IBM Watson?) and pushing a stronger focus on AR content.
Spectacles has entailed the hype of a product that can very quickly be updated to have AR capabilities much like Google Glass or Microsoft HoloLens. Whether Snap Inc decides to keep Spectacles purely as a wearable camera or decides to go down the route of an AR device is purely speculative for now, however,
I thought it may be interesting to conceptualise what the OS may look like for a Snap Inc AR device.
CJ Deasy is a computer science student and is a guest contributor for Haptical. You can follow him on Twitter. Send us a message, if you’d like to re-publish your article, and reach out to thousands of creative minds like you.
