By Anuj Bhatia
Jeetesh Singh, a freelance augmented reality (AR) developer and designer, is among the first Indian developers to gain access to Snap’s fifth-generation Spectacles, a developer-only, AR-powered pair of glasses. Snapchat’s owner, Snap, aims to speed up the development of AR content for its Spectacles and is looking at young Lens creators like Singh to develop compelling AR experiences.
“I wanted to create a unique interaction and was focused on developing a new experience using both hands and creating a new gesture that would be fun and user-friendly. That’s how I started building this experience, then I created a story, and finally, I built the game around it,” said Singh, a Mumbai-based computer engineer.
As described by Singh, Sign of Doom is a first-person shooter game where a portal is shattered, and aliens are flooding the universe. Aliens are trying to shoot at you, and different types of aliens appear at various levels, each with different strengths. When you make an Illuminati sign with your hand, it shoots energy blasts. The more you score, the higher the level you reach. The game is specifically designed for Snap’s Spectacles AR glasses, entirely set in a 3D space.
Singh said his familiarity with Lens Studio helped him take on the challenge of creating an AR game from scratch for the Spectacles AR glasses. Lens Studio is Snap’s proprietary AR developer tool that allows anyone to create Lenses placing interactive, imaginary 3D objects in photos and videos, along with his previous experience developing Lenses for Snapchat.
The game was developed by Singh with some help from Snap community members, who assisted him in designing the user interface. He said one doesn’t need coding knowledge to develop Lenses for Snapchat or an AR game like this. According to Snap, there are over 375,000 Lens creators using Lens Studio, who have built over 4 million Lenses over the years.
Augmented reality is still a niche technology, and a device like Spectacles may seem like a prop from a science fiction film at first, but Snap and the entire tech industry want to mainstream it. However, its AR glasses aren’t available to the public; they are only available to developers through a $99-a-month subscription, which shows there is still a long way to go before AR technology matures. But Snap wants to quickly develop the right content for Spectacles, hoping that developers like Singh might come up with something creative and entirely new that could become the “killer app” needed to shift user behaviour from smartphones to AR glasses.