Snap, the company that owns Snapchat and the Spectacles line of accessories has announced a surprising product: Snap Camera.
The company has ported over their famous camera interface to Mac and Windows and no, this is not like Snapchat. When you use it, you’ll be able to use Snapchat’s lenses like the ones you use on your phone while you are streaming a game on some sight like Twitch. Snap Camera will integrate with apps like YouTube, Twitch, Skype and Zoom.
On PC, the app is relatively small (90MB) and took a short while to download. When you finish installing the app, you are given a choice of thousands of lenses that have been created in-house or by the community for you to choose. At the top is the viewfinder where your camera feeds shows and if you select a filter, it shows up on your face, just like on your phone.
Apparently there are over 250,000 lenses to choose from, which is insane and it means that you’ll not be easily bored since you have a wide collection.
There is also a custom integration with Twitch so that broadcasters will be able to easily add and swap lenses while streaming. For the fans watching the broadcast, they will be able to unlock lenses they see by scanning the Snapcodes.
The interesting thing about this move by Snap is that you don’t need a Snapchat account to use the app, which is strange and cool at the same time. These lenses made Snapchat cool and porting over to the desktop is something we are yet to see it being a thing. However, most laptops have terrible cameras anyway (except the Microsoft Surface line) so your filters will look like they were taken by a potato anyway.
This announcement comes at a time when Snapchat revealed that they had lost 3 million daily active users in Q3 which is not great, and maybe this idea could help them get back in track.
