MARCH/APRIL 2020you’re doing something with AR, you’re giv-
ing over like 80% of the pixels to the audience
to reshape the narrative. That’s going to be a
very different experience.”
But Snap also wants to create enter-
tainment around your relationships with
friends. In February, the company debuted a
new series called Bitmoji TV. Bitmoji, which
Snap acquired in 2016 (a year before Apple’s
Animoji), is an app that allows users to make
a Simpsons-esque caricature of themselves
and use that quirky avatar as another tool for
expression. Bitmoji TV now takes this a step
further, casting your avatar and those of your
friends as the stars of a 10-episode animated
series, a playful riff on Saturday morning car-
toons that also parodies such TV stalwarts as
American Idol. The result is not only engaging
but pulls users deeper into Snapchat.
Snap is also working to expand aug-
mented reality from applying filters to peo-
ple’s faces—selfie mode on their phones—to
the world around them as seen through the
camera on the back. “Everyone’s face feels
unique and relevant to them,” says Murphy,
who as CTO oversees the technical develop-
ment of Snap’s AR products. “So the same
piece of content applied to my face looks
and feels very different than if it’s applied
to yours.” The hurdle with everything that’s
not a face? The world doesn’t hold that same
degree of familiarity.
Late last year, new partnerships with
Coca-Cola and McDonald’s represented the
first time that brands could buy an adver-
tisement for Snap’s Scan feature, which
debuted the previous spring. It allows us-
ers to aim the Snapchat camera at a can of
Coke or a carton of McDonald’s fries to un-
lock secret lenses, such as a polar bear that
appears on your table. It’s no coincidence
that the first two companies to use Scan
are among the world’s most recognizable
brands. The more ubiquitous the partner,
the more AR content for Snapchatters to
find when they point their camera out
into the real world. It’s a playbook that the
company has executed successfully in the
past. Snap enlisted omniprese nt brands
such as Gatorade to popularize AR lenses
by allowing users to dump virtual tubs of
fruit punch on their heads, and, yes, Mc-
Donald’s, to make location-based snaps
commonplace by letting customers unlock
french fry photo filters—but only when
visiting the chain’s restaurants.
“The challenge is, from a Snapchatter
point of view, ‘How do I know that there
is an experience there?’ ” Murphy says. He
anticipates that we’re moving toward a
world in which every object has a hidden
AR component just waiting to be revealed.
But “ ‘How do I unlock [it]?’ We need to set
up some expectation with Snapchatters
around what’s scannable and what’s not.”“Because we have all these amazing lenses
that people are using, you can start ask-
ing yourself questions like, Which of them
would be 10 times better if the field of view
is this big?” Spiegel says, raising his hands
to eye level and spreading the distance be-
tween them from the size of a baseball to
that of a Thanksgiving turkey.
Spiegel, like many of his tech CEO peers,
believes that after smartphones, the next
wave of computing will be some form of
headset. But unlike, say, Apple or Facebook,
both of which are reportedly working on AR
goggles of some sort, Snap continues to de-
velop its Spectacles AR sunglasses—in pub-
lic. Spectacles 3, the company’s third iteration
in as many years, adds a second camera to
the headset, allowing the viewer to record the
world in 3D and add effects with true depth.
The original Spectacles, which were
released in November 2016, were a media
sensation but, ultimately, a flop that would
cause Snap to write off $40 million in un-
sold hardware. Still, the company knew it
was onto something. “Anyone who had that
data in front of them about where sales were
going in the beginning,” argues Snap’s hard-
ware director Steen Strand, “would [have
found it] hard not to be seduced into this
idea that you’re a runaway hit.”
Before joining Snap, in late 2018, Strand
designed airplanes for Icon Aircraft—
products, he says, that can have no “fat,” or
they simply won’t fly. “A product like this?”
he says, gesturing to Spectacles. “You can’t
have fat either.”
This creates an interesting tension, be-
cause Spectacles—unlike the Microsoft Holo-
Lens, a bulky, hologram-filled headset that’s
being marketed mostly to factory workers
and enterprise customers—needs to be both
fashionable and functional. At Art Basel in
Miami Beach, in December, Snap worked
with filmmaker and artist Harmony Korine
(2019’s The Beach Bum), whom Spiegel per-
sonally recruited, to make a three-minuteshort shot entirely using Spectacles 3 and
to create 50 hand-painted, limited-edition,
Gucci-branded Spectacles that shimmer with
an iridescent flare. They became a prized
take-home for the creators at Art Basel who
were gifted a pair, and their outré nature was
the point: Making a wearable computer that’s
actually cool is inherently risky.
Strand and Spiegel readily admit that
AR headsets are likely a decade away from
mainstream adoption (a rare point on
which Snap and Facebook agree. Facebook
did not respond to a request for comment
on this story). So why is Snap still making
Spectacles at all? Why not let Microsoft or
Apple (which is reportedly targeting a 2022
release) pump their unlimited R&D budgets
toward AR headsets and then, when those
hit the market, just swoop in with a similar
product—and a stockpile of a million digital
lenses to make them desirable? “The next 3
to 10 years are ours to lose, because we al-
ready have this huge community of people
engaging with AR all the time,” says Spiegel.
He grabs a paper and pen to illustrate his
point. He draws a rectangle, divided diago-
nally into two triangles. On the left one, he
writes “iPhone.” On the other, the one that
will soon push the first triangle into the
corner, he writes “Spectacles.”
“Over the next 10 to 20 years, iPhone [us-
age] is going to migrate to Spectacles,” he
says. “So the question is, on what timeline?
What’s interesting, though... if we lose this
[hardware] bet, it’s still okay, because we
have the [digital] AR platform. We’ll still
have a very, very large business. But what
would it look like if we also win the hard-
ware piece? Why wouldn’t you try?”
That mantra applies to a lot of Snap
decisions. Create an internet that can self-
destruct? Why wouldn’t you try? Produce
original series in vertical format? Why
wouldn’t you try? Build your own thing in-
stead of selling out? Why wouldn’t you try?
Leaving his office, I take another look
at Spiegel’s desk and imagine him working
there alone in this giant room, polishing his
own design projects for Snap in the quiet,
early hours before the rest of his team arrives.
Behind his desk are dozens of framed prints
and notes. One message stands out from the
sea of ephemera. It says the one thing you’d
think a 29-year-old billionaire who had just
turned around his company would never
need to hear: “You’re doing a good job.”
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