Lens Studio

Lens Studio
Information
Type	Augmented reality authoring software
Industry	Augmented reality
Developer	Snap Inc.
Written In	JavaScript, TypeScript
Operating System	Windows, macOS
License	Free (proprietary)
Supported Devices	Snapchat, Snap Spectacles
Release Date	December 14, 2017
Website	https://ar.snap.com/lens-studio

Lens Studio is a free desktop application from Snap Inc. for creating Augmented Reality effects, called Lenses, that run in Snapchat, on Snap Spectacles, and in third-party apps and websites. It runs on Windows and macOS and is the authoring tool behind Snap's AR platform. Snap released it publicly on December 14, 2017, having previously used a similar tool internally to build Lenses for Snapchat.

Lenses combine real-time camera tracking with 2D and 3D content. At launch, community creators using Lens Studio were limited to World Lenses, which are shot with the rear camera and place virtual objects on real surfaces; only Snap's advertising partners could build front-camera Face Lenses at that point. Snap opened up community Face Lens creation in April 2018. Creators keep the rights to their source assets, while Snap owns the final submitted Lens. The platform grew quickly: by April 2018 Snap reported that around 30,000 community Lenses had been submitted in two months and viewed more than 1 billion times.

Distribution and reach

Lenses built in Lens Studio are distributed inside Snapchat without users installing anything extra. After a Lens passes Snap's moderation, it can be shared through a Snapcode, and at launch that code remained valid for one year. Snap later extended the platform beyond Snapchat itself: Camera Kit is an SDK that embeds the same AR technology in outside apps and websites, and Lenses can also run on Spectacles.

By Lens Fest in 2025, Snap said roughly 400,000 developers had created more than 4 million Lenses, marking ten years of Lenses, and that 175 million people used Lens Games on Snapchat each month.

Tracking and capabilities

Lens Studio exposes several real-time tracking systems that an effect can draw on. According to Snap's developer documentation, these include device tracking (3DoF orientation and 6DoF positional movement through a space), surface and plane detection for horizontal and vertical surfaces, a real-time 3D reconstruction of the surroundings called World Mesh together with depth textures, marker tracking against known images, and object tracking that uses Computer vision to follow things such as pets, bodies, or specific body parts. Location-based features include Custom Location scanning, City Scale AR, Landmarkers (AR anchored to real landmarks), and Spatial Persistence.

Effects are scripted in JavaScript and TypeScript, and the application supports package management and multiple preview windows.

Machine learning

Lens Studio 3.0, released in June 2020, added SnapML, a system that lets creators drop their own trained neural network models into a Lens. The models must be supplied in the ONNX format, and a SnapML Lens is distributed the same way as any other Lens, so it reaches Snapchat users without an extra download. The release shipped SnapML templates covering tasks such as classification, object detection, style transfer, and custom segmentation.

Generative AI

Snap rebuilt the application around generative AI with Lens Studio 5.0, announced at AWE in June 2024 and expanded at the Snap Partner Summit on September 17, 2024. The 5.0 line introduced a GenAI Suite for creating custom ML models and 2D and 3D assets from text or image prompts, including Easy Lens (which builds a Lens from a natural-language description), Body Morph for generating 3D characters and costumes, and an animation library with animation blending. Snap described the rebuilt 5.0 application as designed for productivity, modularity, and speed.

At Lens Fest 2025 Snap added further tools, among them Lens Studio AI (a conversational interface for building Lenses), Realistic StyleGen and Enhanced FaceGen for higher-fidelity real-time effects, and updated mobile and web versions with chat-based creation. Snap also announced Snap Cloud, a developer backend, and tied Lens Studio to the planned public launch of consumer Spectacles in 2026 running Snap OS 2.0.

System requirements

Recent versions of Lens Studio require a 64-bit version of Windows 11 or macOS 12.0 or later, with a minimum of an Intel Core i3, AMD FX, or Apple M1 processor, 8 GB of RAM, and a screen resolution of at least 1280x768. The application is free to download from Snap's AR site. As of May 2026 the current release is version 5.21.0.