Cans of a famous soda with the effigy of the players of the France team that come to life on Snapchat or a Polaroid filter applied to a Story on Instagram.
Long confined to artistic experimentation, Augmented Reality (AR) - the superposition of virtual elements on reality thanks to the camera of a smartphone - has found fertile ground with the advent of filters and especially of “Lenses” popularized since 2015 by the Snapchat social network.
A concept quickly adopted by its competitors like Instagram and more recently TikTok.
Thanks to its open-source creation tool Lens Studio, Snapchat has opened the door to visual AR creations that it produces in-house for major campaigns but which is also available to “snapchatters” and partner creators.
There are around ten major players in France to publish these layers, designed primarily for the profitable and profitable advertising market aimed at a younger audience.
From model to augmented reality
We followed the process of creating Atomic Digital Design, a Parisian start-up founded by former 3D film animators.
From the concept sold to a Lens brand that is displayed in your Carrousel on “Snap”, there is a succession of stages and the use of advanced technologies with a significant development cost.
“We wanted to make interactive content so that viewers become actors in the content they watch.
90% of our activity relates to social augmented reality and luxury and fashion are for the moment our main customers in France ”, summarizes Antoine Vu, one of the co-founders in 2012 of this company of 30 employees which produced last year 120 filters and "Lenses".
First step, the design of the AR experience with a “mock up”, a virtual model to present the project to the client.
It was the Adidas brand that requested an innovative campaign for the launch of its new ZX shoes.
Objectives: to attract the attention of the younger generation by having them try them out from a distance when the stores are often closed.
Once the idea has been validated, its designers will ensure its realization.
“We play the role of the filmmaker who needs other creatives but keeps the idea coherent until the end,” explains Maxime, user experience (UX) design manager.
A 3D file to lighten
To transform a physical product into an interactive virtual element, the shoe will first make a passage to the basement where it is scanned in 3D thanks to a camera which immortalizes it from several hundred angles.
"Scanning an object is the safe bet to obtain all the details of its grain and generate a model in ultra definition" explains Gabriel Picard, the co-founder of this company behind the exclusive sale via Snapchat of concert tickets for the PNL group.
This 3D file in HD then passes through the expert hands of the developers and graphic designers who are in charge of its optimization and its animation thanks to a 3D engine, it is the decisive step of the retopology.
They will be able to modify the height or depth of the image by immersing themselves in its JavaScript code and add the layer of interactivity which will make the Lense dynamic but also optimized.
Because one of the challenges of the Lense or the final filter is technical: you have to be able to fit the special effects in a 4 MB file that is easy to download almost directly from a server to the application to avoid any bugs.
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Finally, AR developers program the behaviors of the final experience to ensure faultless rendering before exporting the result to Snapchat, Instagram or TikTok platforms which will stage these creations.