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Watch the trailer for ‘First Person,’ a climate-focused series shot on Snapchat Spectacles
Snapchat is about to launch “First Person,” the first of its original series to be shot on Snapchat Spectacles.
The idea of filming a documentary using AR-centric eyewear might sound gimmicky, but “First Person” is tackling a weighty topic: climate change.
The series is produced by journalist Yusuf Omar (who said he’s been wearing Spectacles “every day of my life since 2016”) and his Hashtag Our Stories program, which has trained more than 10,000 people in 140 countries to create journalism with their mobile phones.
“First Person” sounds like an extension of that work — the team sent Spectacles to subjects in six countries so that they could document the work that they’re doing to fight climate change.
“When Covid-19 hit, a lot of global media productions stopped shooting,” Omar told me via email. “But our innovators didn’t stop working. Shipping Spectacles to them allowed us to reach stories, otherwise impossible to tell during the coronavirus crisis.”
He added that filming with Spectacles isn’t just a production method — it also allows viewers to literally see things from a climate activist’s perspective.
“The beauty of capturing POV Specs footage for a series like this is that we get to witness change makers actually getting their hands dirty and creating, upcycling, recycling and making the change they want to see,” he said. “Their physical actions, seeing both hands at work, through their vantage point make their actions relatable, interesting and immersive. When young audiences watch it, they think ‘I can probably do that too.’”
In fact, the series also includes AR lenses for each episode — one lens, for example, will add cracks to your floor to indicate water shortage, while another will add carbon dioxide clouds in the sky to illustrate carbon emissions.
“First Person” premieres this Saturday, October 24. You can watch the trailer below.
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7 investors discuss augmented reality and VR startup opportunities in 2020
For all of the investors preaching that augmented reality technology will likely be the successor to the modern smartphone, today, most venture capitalists are still quite wary to back AR plays.
The reasons are plentiful, but all tend to circle around the idea that it’s too early for software and too expensive to try to take on Apple or Facebook on the hardware front.
Meanwhile, few spaces were frothier in 2016 than virtual reality, but most VCs who gambled on VR following Facebook’s Oculus acquisition failed to strike it rich. In 2020, VR did not get the shelter-in-place usage bump many had hoped for largely due to supply chain issues at Facebook, but VCs hope their new cheaper device will spell good things for the startup ecosystem.
To get a better sense of how VCs are looking at augmented reality and virtual reality in 2020, I reached out to a handful of investors who are keeping a close watch on the industry:
- Niko Bonatsos, General Catalyst
- Tipatat Chennavasin, The Venture Reality Fund
- Brianne Kimmel, Work Life Ventures
- Jacob Mullins, Shasta Ventures
- Gigi Levy-Weiss, NFX
- Brayton Williams, Boost VC
- Greg Castle, Anorak Ventures
Some investors who are bullish on AR have opted to focus on virtual reality for now, believing that there’s a good amount of crossover between AR and VR software, and that they can make safer bets on VR startups today that will be able to take advantage of AR hardware when it’s introduced.
“Besides Pokémon Go I don’t think we have seen the engagement numbers needed for AR,” Boost VC investor Brayton Williams tells TechCrunch. “We believe VR is still the largest long-term opportunity of the two. AR complements the real world, VR creates endless new worlds.”
Most of the investors I got in contact with were still fairly active in the AR/VR world, but many still disagreed whether the time was right for VR startups. For Jacob Mullins of Shasta Ventures, “It’s still early, but it’s no longer too early.” While Gigi Levy-Weiss of NFX says that the market is “sadly not happening yet,” Facebook’s Quest headsets have shown promise.
On the hardware side, the ghost of Magic Leap’s formerly hyped glory still looms large. Few investors are interested in making a hardware play in the AR/VR world, noting that startups don’t have the resources to compete with Facebook or Microsoft on a large-scale rollout. “Hardware is so capital intensive and this entire industry is dependent on the big players continuing to invest in hardware innovation,” General Catalyst’s Niko Bonatsos tells us.
Even those that are still bullish on startups making hardware plays for more niche audiences acknowledge that life had gotten harder for ambitious founders in these spaces, “the spectacular flare-outs do make it harder for companies to raise large amounts with long product release horizons,” investor Tipatat Chennavasin notes.
Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
Niko Bonatsos, General Catalyst
What are your general impressions on the health of the AR/VR market today?
We’re seeing some progress in VR and some of that is happening because of the Oculus ecosystem. They continue to improve the hardware and have a growing catalog of content. I think their onboarding and consumption experience is very consumer-friendly and that’s going to continue to help with adoption. On the consumer side, we’re seeing some companies across gaming, fitness and productivity that are earning and retaining their audiences at a respectable rate. That wasn’t happening even a year ago so it may be partially a COVID lift but habits are forming.
The VR bets of several years ago have largely struggled to pan out, if you were to make a startup investment in this space today what would you need to see?
Companies to watch are the ones that are creating cool experiences with mobile as the first entry point. Wave VR, Rec Room, VRChat are making it really easy for consumers to get a taste of VR with devices they already own. They’re not treating VR as just another gaming peripheral but as a way to create very cool, often celebrity-driven, content. These are the kinds of innovations that makes me optimistic about the VR category in general.
Most investors I chat with seem to be long-term bullish on AR, but are reticent to invest in an explicitly AR-focused startup today. What do you want to see before you make a play here?
In both AR/VR, a founder needs to be both super ambitious but patient. They’ll need to be flexible in thinking and open to pivoting a few times along the way. Product-market fit is always important but I want to see that they have a plan for customer retention. Fun to try is great, habit-forming is much better. Gaming continues to do pretty well as a category for VC dollars but it’d be interesting to see more founders look at making IRL sports experiences more immersive or figuring out how to enhance remote meeting experiences with VR to fix Zoom fatigue.
There have been a few spectacular flare-outs when it comes to AR/VR hardware investments, is there still a startup opportunity in AR/VR hardware?
Hardware is so capital intensive and this entire industry is dependent on the big players continuing to invest in hardware innovation. Facebook and Microsoft seem to be the main companies willing to spend here while others have backed away. If we expand our thinking for a minute, maybe the first real mainstream breakthrough AR/VR consumer experience isn’t visual. For VR, it might be the mobile experiences. For AR maybe AirPods or AirPod-like devices are the right entry point for consumers. They’re in millions of people’s ears already and who doesn’t want their own special-agent-like earpiece? That’s where founders might find some opportunity.
Tipatat Chennavasin, The Venture Reality Fund
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Temporal raises $18.75M for its microservices orchestration platform
Temporal, a Seattle-based startup that is building an open-source, stateful microservices orchestration platform, today announced that it has raised an $18.75 million Series A round led by Sequoia Capital. Existing investors Addition Ventures and Amplify Partners also joined, together with new investor Madrona Venture Group. With this, the company has now raised a total of $25.5 million.
Founded by Maxim Fateev (CEO) and Samar Abbas (CTO), who created the open-source Cadence orchestration engine during their time at Uber, Temporal aims to make it easier for developers and operators to run microservices in production. Current users include the likes of Box and Snap.
“Before microservices, coding applications was much simpler,” Temporal’s Fateev told me. “Resources were always located in the same place — the monolith server with a single DB — which meant developers didn’t have to codify a bunch of guessing about where things were. Microservices, on the other hand, are highly distributed, which means developers need to coordinate changes across a number of servers in different physical locations.”
Those servers could go down at any time, so engineers often spend a lot of time building custom reliability code to make calls to these services. As Fateev argues, that’s table stakes and doesn’t help these developers create something that builds real business value. Temporal gives these developers access to a set of what the team calls “reliability primitives” that handle these use cases. “This means developers spend far more time writing differentiated code for their business and end up with a more reliable application than they could have built themselves,” said Fateev.
Temporal’s target use is virtually any developer who works with microservices — and wants them to be reliable. Because of this, the company’s tool — despite offering a read-only web-based user interface for administering and monitoring the system — isn’t the main focus here. The company also doesn’t have any plans to create a no-code/low-code workflow builder, Fateev tells me. However, since it is open-source, quite a few Temporal users build their own solutions on top of it.
The company itself plans to offer a cloud-based Temporal-as-a-Service offering soon. Interestingly, Fateev tells me that the team isn’t looking at offering enterprise support or licensing in the near future. “After spending a lot of time thinking it over, we decided a hosted offering was best for the open-source community and long-term growth of the business,” he said.
Unsurprisingly, the company plans to use the new funding to improve its existing tool and build out this cloud service, with plans to launch it into general availability next year. At the same time, the team plans to say true to its open-source roots and host events and provide more resources to its community.
“Temporal enables Snapchat to focus on building the business logic of a robust asynchronous API system without requiring a complex state management infrastructure,” said Steven Sun, Snap Tech Lead, Staff Software Engineer. “This has improved the efficiency of launching our services for the Snapchat community.”
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Snapchat’s new Lens celebrates tomorrow’s NFL kickoff
Snap and the NFL recently announced a multi-year extension to their content partnership. Now, with the season starting tomorrow, they’re revealing more details about what kinds of content fans can expect to find on Snapchat.
For tomorrow night’s kickoff, they’ve created a special augmented reality Lens that takes fans from the Kansas City Chiefs’ locker room (the Chiefs are hosting the Houston Texans) through the tunnel and into Arrowhead Stadium, where they’ll be greeted by Kansas City’s Patrick Mahomes and Houston’s Deshaun Watson.
The Lens will be available nationally, and as regular games begin, it will transform into an entrance into a more generic NFL stadium.
After that, the NFL will be creating a highlight show that updates each game day, plus three weekly shows — “Rankings” (which offers historic NFL facts designed to encourage fan debates), “Mic’d Up” (a behind-the-scenes look at what coaches and players say during the games) and “Predictions.” The NFL will also continue producing “Real Talk with the NFL,” a show that highlights the league’s social justice initiatives.
Ian Trombetta, the NFL’s senior vice president of social and influence marketing, told me that all of this content is created by the league’s social lab in partnership with Snap. And while the NFL continues to see high ratings on traditional linear TV, he said Snapchat plays “a really critical role for us.”
Image Credits: Snap
“It’s always about: How do we engage new audiences, younger audiences, and do it in ways that are very authentic to the platforms?” Trombetta said. “We don’t look to do things that are just content dumps.”
Snapchat says that viewership of NFL content increased 80% during the 2019-20 season, and that 90% of viewers were under the age of 35.
Of course, it’s going to be a strange season. Like other professional sports organizations, the NFL has to test its players for COVID-19, and different teams are taking different approaches toward allowing fans in the stadiums — many games will be taking place without fans at all.
.@NFL launches @Snapchat AR portal celebrating tomorrow’s kickoff https://t.co/mOqNzfZ2wQ @TechCrunch @anthonyha pic.twitter.com/qRKWi282mD
— Russ Caditz-Peck (@RussCP) September 9, 2020
“The [NFL] organization is leaning on us more than they ever had,” Trombetta said. “We didn’t ignore the fact of what’s happening, anyone would be crazy to think we could totally shut that off. There has to be an acknowledgement of it, while also finding new ways, very seamless ways for fans to engage and celebrate rituals around games that they’ve established over years and decades.”
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Palantir’s concentrated governance is great for execs, but what about shareholders?
A few days ago I wrote down a few notes making a bullish case for Palantir, searching to find good news amidst the company’s huge historical deficits.
Heading into the next phase of Palantir’s march to the public markets, I was very curious to see how the company would hone its S-1 filing to give itself the best possible shot during its impending debut.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. You can read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.
And we finally did get a new S-1/A filing, a document that our own Danny Crichton quickly parsed and covered. What he found was a set of amendments that seem to increase the chance that three Palantir insiders will control more than 50% of the company’s voting power forever, possibly making it a controlled company, which would loose the firm from select regulatory requirements.
Danny dryly noted that “given the diminished voting power of employee and investor shares, it is possible that these voting provisions will negatively impact the final price of those shares.” That’s being polite.
Mulling this over this morning, I kept thinking about Snap, which sold stock in its IPO that gave new shareholders no votes at all, and Facebook, which is controlled by Mark Zuckerberg as his personal fiefdom. The two are not alone in this matter. There are a number of other public tech companies that provide certain groups of pre-IPO shareholders more votes than others on a per-share basis, though perhaps to a smaller degree than what Facebook has managed.
It feels like many startups (and former startups) have decided over time that having material shareholder input is a bad idea. That, in effect, they must run companies as not merely monarchies, but unquestioned ones, to boot.
I am not entirely convinced that this is the best way to create long-term shareholder wealth.
If you are on the other side of this particular fence, I understand. After all, Facebook is a global juggernaut and Snap has finally managed to eke out stock-market gains to bring its value back around to where it was when it went public. (A three-year journey.)
But those arguments are only so good. You could easily argue that the two companies could have done much more with less self-sabotage (Facebook) and a bit more spend discipline (Snap).
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Daily Crunch: Snapchat is getting mini apps
Snap announces a bunch of new features, Moderna prepares for the final-stage trial of its coronavirus vaccine and Sony shows off the PlayStation 5.
Here’s your Daily Crunch for June 12, 2020.
1. Snapchat debuts Minis, bite-sized third-party apps that live inside chat
Snap Minis are lightweight third-party programs that users can quickly pull up in the Chat section. This allows them to complete tasks without switching apps, like ordering movie tickets, comparing class schedules, studying a flashcard deck or going through a guided meditation.
The news came at a virtual version of the Snap Partner Summit, in which the company also announced a number of AR updates, including Lens voice search, a bring-your-own machine learning model update to Lens Studio and a geography-specific AR system that will turn public Snaps into spatial data.
2. Moderna set to start final-stage trial of its coronavirus vaccine by July
Pharmaceutical company Moderna told Bloomberg that it’s on pace to begin by July the final-stage clinical trial of its vaccine for the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. The company has previously said that it could potentially begin offering experimental doses available to healthcare workers in limited capacities as early as this fall.
3. And finally … here’s Sony’s PlayStation 5
Sony finally revealed the PS5 tower in all its glory. It doesn’t look entirely un-router-like — but if so, it’s a sleek-looking router.
4. Chris Cox returns to the fold as Facebook’s chief product officer
After a very high-profile departure last year, Facebook’s former chief product officer Chris Cox will return to his long-held position. He said the unique national and global climate of 2020 influenced his decision, particularly the coronavirus pandemic, its subsequent economic devastation and the nation’s current focus on “a reckoning of racial injustice.”
5. Why are unicorns pushing back IPOs when the Nasdaq is near record highs?
Instacart just announced that it has raised fresh capital at a valuation north of $13 billion. DoorDash, meanwhile, is reportedly looking to add more cash at a pre-money valuation that exceeds $15 billion. Both announcements make it plain that late-stage unicorns are still able to attract huge sums despite a putatively uncertain IPO market. (Extra Crunch membership required.)
6. Microsoft’s Brad Smith says company will not sell facial recognition tech to police
Microsoft is joining IBM and Amazon in taking a position against the use of facial recognition technology by law enforcement — at least, until more regulation is in place.
7. UK competition watchdog launches investigation into Facebook’s $400M acquisition of Giphy
The UK Competition and Markets Authority — the country’s antitrust watchdog — announced that it has launched an investigation into Facebook’s acquisition of Giphy. Specifically, it’s looking to see how and if the deal will lessen competition in the two companies’ respective markets.
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.
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Snap lets you play as your Bitmoji in third-party games
Snap is announcing at its Snap Partner Summit that the first games that will take advantage of Bitmoji will roll out soon. The feature was announced last year, and it looks like developers can finally take advantage of that SDK. You’ll be able to play a game with you as the hero — or at least the Bitmoji representation of you.
While this feature is reminiscent of Xbox Avatars or Nintendo’s Mii on the Wii, 3DS and Wii U, Bitmoji for Games is a cross-platform solution, from mobile games to console games and PC games. The issue with console-specific avatars is that you can’t support Xbox Avatars on PlayStation consoles for instance — that could be the reason why console manufacturers have been slowly phasing out those avatars. Bitmoji for Games could potentially solve that issue.
Having said that, the initial list of partners only includes mobile games on iOS and Android. Games include Super Brawl Universe from Nickelodeon and Playsoft, Uno from Mattel, Scrabble GO from Scopely and a soon-to-be-announced game from French startup Voodoo.
Let’s hope that Snap will be able to expand its list of partners beyond board games and casual mobile games. For instance, I would totally see Bitmoji for Games in Just Dance.
Here’s a concept video presenting the feature. As you can see, you just have to connect with your Snapchat account to import your Bitmoji to third-party games:
In other news, Snap is adding more games to Snapchat. There are already more than a dozen games that you can play with your friends when you’re chatting with them. Some of them are built in-house while others are developed by third-party game makers.
According to the company, 100 million Snapchat users have played a game since the feature launched last year. On average, users who choose to play Bitmoji Party, a Mario Party-inspired game that lets you compete with your friends in mini-games, spend 20 minutes in the game in a given day.
There’s a direct correlation between engagement and monetization as Snap doesn’t rely on micro-transactions and in-app purchases with Snap Games. The company monetizes this feature with video ads.
“We took a look at the state of mobile gaming a few years back and observed that so many successful games on mobile didn’t have your friends that deeply integrated into the experience,” Director of Product Will Wu told TechCrunch. “There’s a lot of games you just play solo on the bus or on the airplane or something like that. For us, we were really looking to recreate that experience that we may have had growing up, sitting side by side with our friends playing a game on a couch together. You’re actually looking at the same screen.”
The most interesting new game that the company will release in the coming months is Bitmoji Paint. This game is a sort of casual Minecraft-inspired creativity game. Users play together on the same planet and can paint tiles on the ground. It lets you create pixel art and look at other creations.
Other new games include Bumped Out (Zynga), Friend Quizzes (Game Closure), Ready Set Golf! (PikPok) and Sling Racers (Madbox). They will be released over the coming months.
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Snapchat redesigns its app with new action bar
Snap is unveiling some important changes for Snapchat at its Snap Partner Summit. The navigation has been rethought with a new action bar at the bottom that lets you access Snap Map and Snap Originals in just a tap.
Snap Map is also getting some brand new features to compete head-to-head with Google Maps. A new banner called “Happening Now” is also being rolled out to all users in the U.S. with a curated selection of stories at the top of the Discover tab.
Snap has been testing the new design for a while and it is now official. While Snapchat has always been a bit obscure to figure out for newcomers, navigation has been greatly simplified with the redesign.
For instance, Snapchat now has a good old navigation bar with five tabs at the bottom. The company calls it the action bar, as it’s supposed to change contextually based on what you’re doing. But at heart, it’s simply a way to access some of Snap’s most popular products in just a tap.
Old-school users will still feel at home with conversations on the left of the camera and stories on the right of the camera. But there are now two additional tabs.
All the way at the bottom left, Snap Map now has its own button — you no longer have to pull down from the camera screen to access the map.
At the bottom right, you’ll find two buttons that replace the previous Discover button. The old Discover tab is now called Stories. It features stories from friends, subscriptions and story recommendations.
If you swipe right one more time, you’ll find a new tab called Discover. It replaces the previously hidden tab called Shows. It features Snap Originals, the company’s original video content, stories that are currently trending on the platform and a new “Happening Now” section (more on that below).
Many apps copied Snapchat’s design over the years. Swiping your screen left and right to switch from one tab to another is a fluid and seamless experience. Square’s Cash App is a great example of how it feels.
But it creates some issues around discoverability. Many users probably didn’t know they could access Snap Map by swiping down on the screen, for instance.
Tapping on buttons feels like clicking on links on a website. It’s less elegant but it’s efficient, as you can see the buttons right here on the screen. Snapchat already switched to a hybrid model with buttons to access conversations and the Discover tab for those who don’t know they can swipe left and right. With the new buttons, it should be even easier to figure out what you can do in the app.
Find local businesses in Snap Map
Snap Map is the company’s take on a mapping product. It lets you view the location of your friends in real time — or at least those who have chosen to share their location with you. It also lets you tap on popular places to see what’s happening right now based on Our Story (public stories).
There are now 200 million people using Snap Map every month. And the company is about to overhaul it with a lot more information. The company is in the process of adding millions of listings for businesses around the world.
Starting today, you can tap on your favorite places and view some information, such as the address, hours of operation and reviews from TripAdvisor and Foursquare. In the U.S., users can also tap on a button to order food using Postmates, DoorDash and Uber Eats.
This represents a new revenue opportunity for Snap as well. Local businesses will be able to buy ads on Snap Map to highlight their bar, restaurant and business.
A new “Happening Now” banner based on a curation of news stories
Snap is launching a news aggregator of some sort in the Discover tab. At the top of the screen, there’s a new Happening Now section.
Happening Now is based on updates across stories covering politics, entertainment, sports and more. Many news organizations already have their own stories in the Discover tab. With Happening Now, Snap compiles content from partners, such as The Washington Post, Bloomberg, Reuters, NBC News, ESPN, NowThis, E! News and BuzzFeed News.
When you tap on the banner, you can see news content from various sources organized by categories — local, world, sports, politics, etc. The company is rolling out this feature to all users based in the U.S. starting today. It’ll be rolled out to other countries in the next year.
Finally, you can share public stories based on topics. When you share a story, you can choose to share it publicly by tapping on Our Story. It is matched with a location or an event.
Starting today, you can also match it with a topic using topic stickers, such as “Life Hacks” or “Oddly Satisfying.” Users can browse stories based on topics, creating a laid-back experience based on your interests.
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Snap announces new slate of Snap Originals
Snap is going full speed ahead with its original content strategy. The company announced that it has expanded previous partnerships with ESPN, NBCUniversal, ViacomCBS, the NBA and the NFL for new Shows and Snap Originals.
The new slate of Snap Originals includes unscripted series, docuseries as well as scripted dramas and comedies. Here are some of the highlights:
- Coach Kev (Laugh Out Loud), an unscripted show about Kevin Hart giving you advice, inspiration and more.
- Fake Up, a show with optical illusion make-up artists transforming their own faces.
- Move It, an immersive dance show featuring some of the biggest dance influencers.
When it comes to docuseries, here’s an early look at what’s coming up:
There are also three scripted series coming up:
- Frogtown, a series directed by Catherine Hardwicke (Twilight, Thirteen) about an all-girl skating crew.
- Action Royale, a show about an underground esports gambling ring.
- Total Badass Wrestling, a story of mentorship between a young wrestler and a well-known wrestler looking for his second act.
A few existing Snap Originals are also being renewed for another season, such as Dead of Night, Face Forward, Nikita Unfiltered and Vs The World.
Some of those shows have been quite popular, with Dead of Night attracting 15 million viewers, Nikita Unfiltered attracting 22 million viewers and Will From Home (featuring Will Smith) attracting 35 million viewers.
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In the age of social distancing, the LA Rams turn to Snap and Madden to unveil new uniforms
As the U.S. waits for the great reopening of its hallowed national pastimes in an era of pandemic-enforced social distancing, sports teams are increasingly turning to a new wave of digital tools like social media and video games to connect with a new generation of fans.
The Los Angeles Rams are the latest team to embrace the trend, choosing to work with social media giant Snap and EA Sports’ Madden NFL franchise to unveil the new design of their uniforms ahead of the opening of the most high-tech stadium in the National Football League later this year.
The team is working with Los Angeles’ own Snap to unveil the uniforms in a custom-created Snapchat augmented reality lens, featuring the ability to trigger players into action.
The revelation of the uniform in augmented reality, a decision brought about by social distancing measures put in place in California, is a first for any NFL team. The Rams franchise also collaborated with the Madden franchise to provide a sneak peak of the uniform through in-game renders of Rams players showing off the new look.
On Instagram, social media users can see interactive content of the uniforms in their new natural habitat before the stadium opens.
“We had been chatting about how to use AR for a while. Just across the board,” said Lexi Vonderlieth, the head of partnership marketing. “We were trying to figure out ways to bring the uniform to life and showcase that a bit and create something that was a bit engaging.”
From the world lens through Snap, viewers can see Jared Goff or Aaron Donald in their apartments, living rooms or backyards. Through the selfie view Snap users can put on the new jersey and Rams helmet.
The Los Angeles-based Snap has had a longtime relationship with the Rams — in part through proximity and in part through connections in the Los Angeles business world.
The unveiling of the uniforms, which happened earlier today, marked the first time that Snap had worked with a franchise directly instead of with the National Football League broadly.
Earlier uses of the Snap filters and camera this season came during the NFL draft itself — where Snap rolled out special cams as a way for fans to celebrate and represent their own teams.
The National Football League actually plays a prominent roll in the history of Snap lenses. The famous “Gatorade dump” tradition where the coach from the winning team in the Super Bowl gets doused with Gatorade by his players was one of the first lenses that Snap developed.
“We saw this incredible connection in how AR could engage,” said Snap senior director of global creative strategy, Jeff Miller. “Snap is a platform that is built for connecting with close friends and family. Sports passion is expressed through those kinds of connections.”
Snap, in some senses, is uniquely positioned to amplify the fan experience in a socially distanced sporting world. “[The technology] gives us an ability to create amazing experiences that can replace a physical activation, enhance it or give alternatives in a sport-from-home environment.”
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