Lensathon: A tale of creativity, design & real-like world!
LENSATHON — India’s first Augmented Reality Lens creation hackathon! Quite a mouthful, isn’t it? Not just big on words, the challenge was profoundly interesting and engaging for everyone who was a part of it.
Before we take a deep dive into the Lensathon story, we want to remind you that you can continue to engage, share, and learn with other creators in the Snapchat community. You can meet and interact with other AR creators on different Snapchat groups:
Machine Learning Enthusiasts — By joining the SnapML Lenses group here
Create your own world — By joining the Animation & 3D Lenses group here
Making images come to life — By joining the Marker Tech Lenses here
Snap Inc. is a camera company. They believe in reinventing the camera as it represents their greatest opportunity to improve lives and enhance communication. Their contribution to human progress has been through the empowerment of people through expression. Snap Inc. encourages people to live in the moment, learn about the world and have fun together. This vision transformed into the creation of their multimedia messaging app Snapchat which seamlessly allows users to communicate with each other visa sharing of still images or short videos.
Snapchat has been downloaded by millions of users worldwide. Their Q1 2020 business report states that about 229 million users worldwide accessed Snapchat and over 4 billion Snaps were created daily during that period. Lenses made by the community via Lens Studio now makeup over 30% of the snaps made every day with a Lens. By the end of Q1 2020, over 900,000 Lenses had been created by the Snapchat community through Lens Studio, up from over 700,000 at the end of Q4 2019.
To promote heightening of user experience on the platform in India, Snapchat India launched this amazing concept of a hackathon, aptly naming it as Lensathon on Skillenza’s platform, for creating AR Lenses using Lens Studio. Being the first of its kind, this visionary event brought together an amazing amalgamation of graphic design skills with AR technology.
This nationwide hackathon provided an opportunity to one and all from all sorts of backgrounds. Yes, you heard that right! Experience of graphic designing was not a requirement to register for this challenge. College students and interested professionals with an innovative and creative streak were called upon to use their imagination to build exhilarating AR experiences using Lens Studio.
Ample training was provided for beginners through webinars and tutorials before the actual competition commenced. Snapchat’s team also interacted with the attendees and answered their queries during these sessions. Being an online hackathon, learning and competing from home was a great advantage for the participants.
Besides the monetary rewards and accolades awarded to the top lens creators, the event also provided the participants a chance to be considered for the Official Lens Creator (OLC) program by Snapchat.
Event timeline:
How did it all happen?
Majority of them had no awareness regarding Lens Studio although most of them (~90%) had used Snapchat before. Another important statistic revealed was that only 23% of the participants had any previous AR skills or experience.
We received participation from all across the nation. Delhi had the maximum number of participants from a single city. Detailed participants’ demographic distribution can be seen here:
We had set a few themes for the participants to choose from:
- Work from home Lenses: With working from home being the new normal during the Covid-19 pandemic, using lenses to create fun office backgrounds during work calls or funny lenses for casual colleague meetings is a great concept to work with. It’s all about making your virtual presence more fun and social.
- Lenses for real friends: During this era of social distancing, staying connected to friends is really important. This theme serves this purpose of lifting up casual conversations with friends with amusing and fun lenses.
- Funny, beauty and cute Lenses: This theme enables creative ideas to flow in order to project different personalities on people.
- Lenses for a social cause: From global warming to deforestation to wildlife conservation, this theme allowed participants to choose any social cause of their choice and present lenses which could make users more aware and educated on these topics.
- Indian Summers / Summer Holidays: This theme provided participants to dig into their own experiences and dreams of spending the hot and fun Indian summers.
- Fantasy Land: It’s always fun to fantasize a world with magical creatures or robotic armies or impossible gadgets etc. Participants were encouraged to create fictional themes to temporarily transport users to a fun imaginary world.
- Virtual Travel: From New York to Paris to Dubai, this theme called out to build innovative background lenses which virtually transported users to any part of the world that they wished to travel to.
- Education / Learning: This focused on creating Snapchat Lenses that enabled easy learning by adding components of the subjects on the screen during virtual classes or tutoring sessions.
After attending all the webinars related to learning about creating Snap lenses using Lens Studio as well as interacting with the Snapchat India team and Official Lens Creators (OLCs), we received amazingly inventive Lens entries based on all the above themes. “Funny, beauty and cute Lenses” had the maximum number of submissions followed by “Social Cause”.
Winner Selection:
We received over 1000 Lens creations from almost 500 unique contenders. After a grueling evaluation by a panel of expert judges which included Snap’s SVP of Camera Platform, Eitan Pilipski and Global Head of Creative Strategy, Jeff Miller, 7 well-deserved winners were selected and ranked in order to receive their earned rewards.
The following criteria were used (with equal weightage), by a team from Snapchat, to assess these numerous entries:
- Lens Views or Engagement (This represented the number of views on snaps that were posted by people using the submitted Lens)
- Technicality
- Originality
- Creativity
Juhi Bhatnagar, Strategy and Business Development Lead, India at Snap expressed that they were overwhelmed by the creativity expressed by the participants and were extremely elated to award the winners of the competition. Subhendu Panigrahi, Co-founder and CEO of Skillenza, reiterated these thoughts by conveying how Lensathon was not only an excellent medium for Snapchat to reach out to thousands of creators across India but also was a brilliant opportunity for anyone and everyone to learn new digital skills in the Augmented Reality space.
A mix of both students and young professionals made it to the winning list and collectively won the total monetary prize pool of Rs 3,50,000. It gives us immense pleasure to announce the winners:
The Winning Lenses:
1st place winner: 21-year-old Vishal Yadav from Silvassa, won a cash reward of Rs 1,00,000 along with Snap Spectacles 3, Swag Bag and a Certificate of Achievement.
Lens: Bubble Blower | Theme: Indian Summers
- 2nd place winner: 20-year-old Akash Bajpai from Sitapuri won Rs 70,000 in the form of monetary rewards, Swag Spectacle 3, Swag Bag and a Certificate of Achievement.
Lens: Lazylad | Theme: Work From Home
- 3rd place winner: Kolhapur resident, 21-years-old Apoorva Pise, 21, Kolhapur won Rs 50,000, Swag Spectacle 3, Swag Bag and a Certificate of Achievement.
Lens: Infinity | Theme: Fantasy Land
- 4th place winner: Kavin Kumar, 21 from Bangalore won Rs 20,000 in monetary rewards, Swag Bag and a Certificate of Achievement.
Lens: Pose | Theme: Beauty, Cute, Funny
- 5th place winner: Anshika Verma, 21 from Ghaziabad won a monetary reward of Rs 10,000 with a Swag Bag and a Certificate of Achievement.
Lens: Bellydance | Theme: Social cause
- Most Popular Lens: 23-years-old Karanvir Matharoo from Ludhiana created the Most viewed or Engaged Lens and was rewarded with a prize of Rs 50,000, a Swag Bag and a Certificate of Achievement.
Lens: Smokey Blue | Theme: Fantasy Land
- Most Creative Lens: Altaha Ansari, 21, Prayagraj built the most innovative and artistic Lens and won Rs 50,000, a Swag Bag and a Certificate of Achievement.
Lens: Cosmic Architect | Theme: Fantasy Land.
Qualifying participants who submitted at least one Lens were awarded with Certificates of Participation.
Snapchat has made all these filters available for use across the entire user community. You can follow these steps to be able to access them:
- Open Snapchat and point the camera at the Snapcode
- Press and hold on the Snapcode to unlock the Lens
- Double-tap the screen to switch between selfie mode or world lens
- Don’t forget to switch on your volume!
What did the participants have to say?
Vishal Yadav, our 1st Prize winner, eloquently says:
Our other winners voiced similar experiences. Here are their testimonials:
We received numerous responses on our various media platforms from various other participants as well.
The common review that participants gave was that Lensathon was a welcome respite during the trying times of the COVID-19 crisis. They expressed through emails and posts or comments on various social media that Lensathon was a unique and exciting experience for them. Many were not even aware of hackathons, but the one-of-a-kind concept of competing for Snap Lens creation was too interesting of an opportunity to give up on.
Even for people who had already participated in other hackathons were extremely excited to give this a shot. The new-age skill set of Lens creation was enticing not only from the job-prospects perspective, but also provided an opportunity to explore the creative aspect of everyone’s personalities and thoughts
As soon as the event drew to a close, messages from numerous participants came pouring in wishing for more similar hackathons to be conducted. Many expressed that they could not wait for the next Lensathon to happen again.
Plans for upcoming hackathons:
The positive response and popularity that this Lensathon event received is encouraging for us to brainstorm plans for similar future hackathons on Augmented Reality Lens creations. We strive to reach out more and encourage more participation for such learning events where it’s interesting to upskill yourself. There are ideas to upgrade this hackathon’s participation format from individuals to teams, focus on conducting more workshops with hands-on training before the actual competition as well as building and engaging with AR communities in the pre-hackathon stage to increase more participation.
Final words:
It was only the enthusiasm and creativity of all the participants that made Lensathon such a massive success. Even though the competition is over, you can continue to engage, share, and learn with other creators in the Snapchat community. You can meet and interact with other AR creators on different Snapchat groups:
Machine Learning Enthusiasts — By joining the SnapML Lenses group here
Create your own world — By joining the Animation & 3D Lenses group here
Making images come to life — By joining the Marker Tech Lenses here
In case none of the above links works for you, you can join this WhatsApp group and drop a message on which group you would like to join and Snapchat Team will add you.
Hackathon is the new trend of competing in the software world and it is here to stay. Participating enables learning as well as resume building. Besides Lensathon, Skillenza’s platform hosts various other challenges which include product building hackathons, coding competitions and webinars on various subjects ranging from Python to AI to Architecture Design. If you are looking to upskill yourself or engage in assessment of your learnings, look up our website and explore to find challenges that interest you.
