Baby Fairy

Inspiration

My wife is pregnant and I’ve never seen her spend this much time on Google before. For the next 9 months, she’s researching everything that’s happening inside her body, and all the things she can do to stay healthy for her and the baby.

There are popular pregnancy apps that timeline the journey, but 2D pictures on mobile screens are so disconnected from reality. You don’t get a sense of the size of the fetus, especially in relation to your own body. The entire experience feels like a mundane calendar, lacking any personality or personalization.

What it does

Baby Fairy is like a really good sex ed teacher, helping demystify the journey of pregnancy.

You open your world or selfie camera on Snapchat and follow the prompts to get a week-by-week timeline of growth and development of a fetus, and of what symptoms they can expect.

AR overlays 3D models of fetal developmental milestones onto your body. We also use different types of fruit to help visualize the fetus's size.

The lens also provides useful health tips along the way for those who are pregnant.

However, this lens is not just for pregnant people to see what’s going on inside their bodies. We wanted to open up the experience to anyone eager to learn. It could be the partner of the person who’s pregnant or really anyone who wants to understand more about pregnancy.

How we built it

With a lot of sweat and tears :sweat_smile: It started with consulting both pregnant and non-pregnant users about what they’d want from this experience. We studied the features they found popular from other apps, and the ones that were missing and needed.

Then we built the 3D models from scratch, coded everything specifically for Lens Studio and did hand-drawn illustrations for the fairy. One of our lens creators (Lafiya) is also the voice of the fairy.

Challenges we ran into

UI/UX

The biggest challenge was/is onboarding people to use the lens. They’re accustomed to the touchscreen being the primary input to navigate menus, and now we’re saying ‘use your voice and body to find your way around this product’.

Lens Studio

Baby Fairy requires a lot of precise timing work. We had to perfectly time the introduction and explanations we provided for the user and time each of the 40 slides included for each week of pregnancy to fit it all into one lens. Phew!

Size

Gah! The maximum lens size allowed by Lens Studio is 8MB which meant that we had to work on compressing the assets we were using without losing quality. But we did it!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

How you interact with the lens is truly unique! Wave your arms or speak to Baby Fairy with VOICE ML.

Most importantly, we’re just glad to make a lens that is actually a useful tool in people’s lives. Something they can revisit on a weekly basis and a resource at the intersection of education, health, and wellness.

Voice ML

There’s some major progress in the touch-free utility of phones here. We’ve used Voice ML to give the user a new form of interactivity with the product. This makes Baby Fairy feel so human!

Body tracking

It’s a new experience for most people to operate a user interface without actually touching their screen.

What we learned

It’s really hard educating users to operate their phone in a brand new way. For example, having them prop their phone up against a surface and take a step back, while still operating their phone using gestures. That’s a huge leap of the imagination for many people and it requires a lot of onboarding for the lens up top.

What's next for Baby Fairy

The potential next steps for Baby Fairy are transitioning from fetal development models to newborn milestone visualization. We're also working on using machine learning to get the product to respond to user questions and build it out to be more of a responsive learning resource.