How this Indian developer created an AR game for Snap’s Spectacles glasses

Jeetesh Singh has developed the AR Spectacles game, “Sign of Doom.”(Image credit: Anuj Bhatia/Indian Express)

“I wanted to create a unique interaction and was focused on developing a new experience using both hands and creating a new gesture that would be fun and user-friendly. That’s how I started building this experience, then I created a story, and finally, I built the game around it,” said Singh.

“I was initially building some small experiences on my Spectacles, but I couldn’t come up with a specific idea that I could turn into a full-fledged application. However, when I thought about this game and the type of experience I wanted to develop, I felt this would be engaging and have the potential to be something people might want to play,” said Singh, a computer engineer.

As described by Singh, “Sign of Doom” is a first-person shooter game where a portal is shattered, and aliens are flooding the universe. In the game, you play as someone who possesses mystical signs with your hands. Aliens are trying to shoot at you, and different types of aliens appear at various levels, each with different strengths. When you make an Illuminati sign with your hand, it shoots energy blasts. The more you score, the higher the level you reach. The game also includes a leaderboard where you can compete with players from all over the globe. “Sign of Doom” has a Dragon Ball Z-like vibe but is specifically designed for Snap’s Spectacles AR glasses, entirely set in a 3D space.

“It’s very similar to how you make Lenses for Snapchat. The only thing you have to take care of is doing 3D interactions with the hands, because this time, you don’t have any controllers. You are not bound to a 2D screen, so you are not touching the screen at all. You’re actually interacting with them as though they are physically present. So that is something you should keep in mind, and you should try to involve more of the three-dimensional aspect of the Spectacles that you have,” Singh said as he explained the difference between creating Lenses for the Snapchat app and developing immersive content like this for Spectacles.

Singh said his familiarity with Lens Studio helped him take on the challenge of creating an AR game from scratch for the Spectacles AR glasses. Lens Studio is Snap’s proprietary AR developer tool that allows anyone to create Lenses placing interactive, imaginary 3D objects in photos and videos, along with his previous experience developing Lenses for Snapchat.

Singh said it took him some time to figure out the kind of user interface people interact with and the kind of UI they expect when playing a game that feels futuristic, completely in 3D space. “Whenever you are playing a game like GTA or Counter-Strike, it’s a screen-based UI. But this time, I needed to go 3D, to enter another dimension,” he said. “I am not a gamer. I needed help from others,” said Singh.

A visitor tries Snap’s Spectacles AR glasses at an event in Mumbai, India. Image credit: Anuj Bhatia/Indian Express)

The game was developed by Singh on his own, but he did take some help from Snap community members, who assisted him in designing the user interface. “My little cousin was drawing some characters for me, so I took those characters as my reference and built them in Blender from scratch,” Singh said.

Singh said one doesn’t need coding knowledge to develop Lenses for Snapchat or an AR game like this. This means anyone can get into making Lenses for Snapchat or take up development for AR experiences for Spectacles, but the prerequisite is a bit of creativity and a willingness to learn.
Snap says there are already over 375,000 Lens creators using Lens Studio, who have built nearly 4 million Lenses over the years.

“For Android and iOS, you have to hard-code. But when it comes to AR software specifically, it’s like building any other filter or Lens. It doesn’t require any programmatic background because it supports no-code development. You also have Gen AI to help you while you’re developing, which makes it comparatively much easier. You just have to learn a web-based language, which is JavaScript, and then you’re good to go. So, it’s relatively much easier to build a Snapchat Lens compared to iOS or Android apps,” Singh said.

Singh added that creating a Lens takes a week or two, but the AR game he worked on took him around three to four weeks.

The Spectacles are built to understand the world and space around you. (Image credit: Jeetesh Singh)

When a creator like Singh develops a Lens for Snapchat or content for Spectacles, it goes through a process where the team at Snap reviews the Lens and only approves it afterwards. “We don’t have to pitch or ask for permission from Snap before building. Since we got access to Spectacles, we just have to develop the experiences we intend to make, ensuring we are not violating any policies.” “You can always think of an idea and approach Snapchat for funding because they have opened up a funding portal where you can present your Spectacles ideas and, if your project aligns with Snapchat’s goals, you can receive funding from them,” he said.

Augmented reality is still a niche technology, and a device like Spectacles may seem like a prop from a science fiction film at first, but Snap and the entire tech industry want to mainstream it. However, its AR glasses aren’t available to the public; they are only available to developers through a $99-a-month subscription, which shows there is still a long way to go before AR technology matures. But Snap wants to quickly develop the right content for Spectacles, hoping that developers like Singh might come up with something creative and entirely new that could become the “killer app” needed to shift user behaviour from smartphones to AR glasses.