As officially announced at “Lens Fest,” the annual celebration of Snap’s global AR community, iTranslate teamed up with Snap Inc. to give AR developers the tools to build more engaging, immersive, and accessible experiences. All Lens creation starts with Lens Studio, which is the company’s AR creation tool designed for artists and developers to build Lenses for Snapchatters worldwide.
Lens Studio and its “Lenses”
Lenses are AR experiences that change and transform the way you look and how you experience the world around you. They’re an unparalleled way to use augmented reality and provide a playground for creators, designers, 3D professionals, developers, and end-users alike. The lens makers are able to create “Face Lenses” that use a device’s front camera and “World Lenses” for rear camera experiences.
With the help of external APIs provided by companies like iTranslate, AR developers can create even more immersive, powerful, and helpful lenses that otherwise couldn’t be built or would take too much effort and time.
How iTranslate’s translation API is used at Lens Studio
Lens Studio allows the usage of data obtained from external APIs, such as weather, stock market information, or as in our case, a translation service via the “Remote Service Module.” Developers can then use the data from these APIs for new lenses. To be more precise, this module provides a scripting API to call the endpoints of iTranslate’s translation API to do two things basically:
- to translate text in a Text object
- to translate text in a Text3D object
In both use cases, developers use a provided script of the “Remote Service Module” that translates Text or Text3D objects. To translate simple Text objects, you attach the script to a Scene object that includes a Text component. After that, you select the desired source and target language. For 3D objects, you use the same script, attach a Scene object that contains a Text3D component, and select the source and target language again. Lens Studio also provides example scripts with content from which developers can learn to extend the given scripts to even more use cases.
The AR community is growing bigger every year, and iTranslate is exceptionally proud to share its experience, knowledge, and enthusiasm with such a pioneer in that field like Snap Inc.
Read more about Lens Studio, Snap. Inc. in general, and their phenomenal recent Lens Fest here:
https://newsroom.snap.com/lens-fest-2021
https://lensstudio.snapchat.com/templates/apis/translate-api/
https://lensstudio.snapchat.com
