Nidavellir

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  Some of the code we wrote

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  Visual Script

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  A shot of our lens in action

Inspiration ❗

Marvel movies have become a cultural keystone, and we are no strangers to the Marvel-ous worlds and characters weaved into each other to create heart-gripping superhero sagas. Each film makes you feel as if you're right up there with your superheroes, fighting aliens and saving multiple planets!

One such planet, or more accurately, a neutron star, is where the universe’s greatest superpowers are birthed - Nidavellir. This is where Thor’s own Mjølnir was forged - it was the playground of the Dwarves, who are the best blacksmiths over all realms.

Our Snapchat lens does exactly this - it gives you, the superhero, everything you need to forge your own superpowers unheard of. Hence, we christened it Nidavellir.

We wanted to recreate that experience on Snapchat and take it much closer to the fans. We wanted to make the users feel like they themselves had their favorite superheroes' powers! We want to take you, the user and the superhero, all the way to Nidavellir and grant you the ability to forge your own superpowers out of sheer will.

How it works 🛠️

This lens has two options - a laser beam superpower, and a portal-conjuring superpower. The UI is very self-explanatory, and allows you to switch between the superpowers at will. The first superpower, the laser beam, allows you to control a wide beam of laser cast from your special eyewear. The second superpower lets you create a magical portal, à la Dr. Strange, with a flick of your fingers. In short, these filters make you feel like the superhero you are.

How we plan on monetizing it 💰

1. Partner with gaming and toy brands to promote products through the lens.
2. Collaborate with game developers to develop the lens into a full-fledged game, promoted by the lens.
3. In-Lens purchases: place products in the lens (with a storyline maybe) and promote them on behalf of the products’ brands.

How we made it 🖥️

Scott's Optic Blast 🧨

For the Laser Beam superpower, we needed to create a Physically Based Rendering (PBR) of specialized eyeglasses to sit on a Head Binding’s “eyes”. For the beam itself, we created a “Tween”, or an in-between transition image that appeared as a laser beam emitted from the eyewear. Hand tracking was also required to keep track of the finger.

Doctor Strange Portal ⭕️

For the Portal superpower, a portal was created using the particles component and VFX editor, and made to glow with the cinematic effect. A manual script was created to recognize 2 fingers or victory pose, which enabled the particles to appear on screen for 8 seconds.

As for the UI, it was created using UIWidgets and UI panel’s button and text component, where users can choose the power they want and once selected, the UI disappears for the user to play with the power.

Challenges we ran into 🔥

Conceiving of Nidavellir-worthy superpowers proved to be quite the challenge. In more Earth-friendly terms, harnessing the many, many features of Lens Studio to create our superpowers had us deal with the following:

• Tween Manager - Unexpected behavior and the complexity posed a real challenge.
• Trajectory of the beam - The beam had to be focused and follow the movement of the eyewear. Implementing this behavior was a demanding task.
• Using Physics with the collider - The collider was a real object with real physics - emulating this was tough.
• Behavior of the beam and transparency of the collider - The collider object needed to disappear into the user’s being when they touched two fingers to their temples. Making sure that the object attached to the finger was transparent and remains as such when colliding with eyewear object was a challenge.
• Tracking and detecting the usage of two fingers - The powers can be triggered using two fingers - hand-tracking this motion and verifying the gesture took some time.
• Jazzing it up - Making the portals and the beam look futuristic and as majestic as the superpowers demand was arduous yet fun!

Accomplishments that we're proud of 🏆

To be honest, we are very proud of the fact that we submitted, considering that we started working on the hackathon pretty late! All of us are new to field of AR and this was an amazing learning experience. A couple of things that we are really proud of:

• Getting stuff to work with the limited knowledge that we had
• We're very proud of the fact that our team was able to split up and work to each team member's strengths to make this submission possible.
• The Physics Collider. Boy, was that tough. It took a lot of time and patience to crack that nut!

What we learned 📚

We learned that:

• we should never put off submitting to the last minute xD
• in the realm of AR (especially with respect to Snapchat), there is very little that is not possible (yet 😆) and that we can come up with use cases that benefit the masses.

Built With

• glsl
• lens
• lensstudio
• three.js