At Snap Inc.’s inaugural APAC AR Day (Asia Pacific Augmented Reality Day) in India, the company’s co-founder and CEO, Evan Spiegel, flew in from Los Angeles to Mumbai for the event. It was a big surprise for content creators and developers. Spiegel joined Snap’s president for APAC, Ajit Mohan, for a fireside chat. The duo discussed about AR its impact on marketing and innovation, and more.
Read the edited excerpts from the chat.
On impact of AR investments
Spiegel: One of the things we felt for a really long time is that computers and the internet are unbelievably powerful, but they’ve always taken us away from the real world. I mean, growing up, I loved computers. But in order to use a computer, I had to go to the computer lab and my school. Instead of going and playing on the yard during recess, I go and work inside the computer lab, then, of course mobile phones came along. And now when you walk along the street, and you can’t help but see everybody just with their head buried down in their phone instead of engaging, you know, more broadly with their friends or with the world. And so as we started working on augmented reality, we saw an opportunity to bring all of the power of the internet and computing into the world so that people can enjoy the world around them, enjoy their connections with their friends, and actually experience computing together in a totally new way.
So as we look to the future of augmented reality, we know that it’s going to transcend the tiny phone, phone form factor to glasses, and we’re really excited about the progress we’ve been making with spectacles, I’m sure we’ll have more announcements there soon, as well. So, you know, as we look to the future of computing, it’s very clear that computing is going to become more and more embedded in our real lives in the real world. And of course, bring us together with our real friends.
On AR in marketing
Spiegel: Well, I think that probably more in a position to learn from all of you to share my feedback on what you all could be building. But I think what’s been so exciting in India is obviously how many young people there are. I mean, there’s a huge group of young people in India who are creating India’s future right now. And I think augmented reality is going to be a key part of that. And so, you know, giving people augmented reality experiences to express themselves or to help people learn about the world, I think is a huge opportunity and whether that’s partnering with brands to get more distribution or just building things for fun. You know, I think there’s an enormous amount of opportunity to reach the 200 million plus folks who are on Snapchat in India and growing.
On creative experiences
Spiegel: I think what’s so useful in terms of AI, especially for all of us here as developers and creators, is that it really just reduces that barrier to creativity. One of the things that we found early on with augmented reality was it’s very hard to, you know, generate 3D assets to take someone a really long period of time to build all those 3D assets. There’s actually a pretty small number of 3D assets in the world, you know, on the order of millions, not billions, and billions like there are images or videos. And so how can we use AI to actually reduce the barrier of creation for those 3D assets. That’s something we’ve been investing a lot in recently to make it easier and easier for creators to build more immersive AR experiences by just reducing that barrier to creation for 3D images and making more exciting and immersive lenses with LMS, for example, so I don’t want to ruin all the surprises coming up at lens fest. But there’ll be a bunch of cool new tools to check out that are AI enabled.
On AR and innovation
Spiegel: That’s probably a full day conversation when it comes to creativity. I think for us at snap creativity it always started with solving a problem for our community. You know, the early days when we built Snapchat is because we were really frustrated with social media. And you know, it was basically a public popularity contest with all these public likes and comments. People couldn’t express, you know, the full spectrum of how they felt they wanted to, you know, appear pretty or perfect or popular. And so we built Snapchat as a way for people to express themselves and have fun with their friends. And ever since then, with new features like augmented reality or like stories, and all the other products we’ve had the opportunity to work on, we’ve really just been responsive to the needs of our community.
When we built the map, for example, that allows you to see what your friends are up to because people were spending all day long answering questions from their friends, where are you? What are you doing? Who are you with? When are you going to be home? Now you can just open the map and answer all those questions in an instant that helps people get together with their friends more often and with less friction. So creativity and innovation for us always follows you know, the opportunities we see by talking to our friends are solving problems that exist out in the world.
Read more: Snap Inc’s Ajit Mohan on the company’s next phase of growth in India