Spectacles Community Challenge #5: Winners Announcement

Each Lens created for Spectacles not only inspires the AR community to push their creative comfort zones, but also showcases how AR glasses are evolving into tools for everyday life—not just futuristic gadgets.

The Spectacles Community Challenge, in collaboration with the Snap Team, was designed to empower developers to experiment with new tools and features, share their creativity, and earn recognition for their work. After more than six months of the Challenge, we’re proud to see the Community embrace this opportunity to its fullest. 💜

Developers could participate in one of three categories, depending on their ideas, skills, and interests:

➡️ New Lens
➡️ Lens Update
➡️ Open Source

A huge congratulations to all the winners of Spectacles Community Challenge #5, and a sincere thank you to everyone who submitted a Lens. Your contributions are helping shape the future of AR glasses, and your creativity hasn’t gone unnoticed. 👏

Let’s meet the winners of Spectacles Community Challenge #5! ⤵️

New Lens Category

⭐ A category that pushes you to experiment with unfamiliar tools, features, and ideas, turning curiosity into innovation to create new, engaging Lenses.

1st Place: Deep Contact by Danny Pimentel

Deep Contact takes users on a journey beneath the ocean’s surface to imagine what it might be like if the sea could speak. The Lens explores the intelligence, language, and culture of octopuses, inviting participants to attempt humanity’s first true contact. It’s a thought-provoking experience that turns the ocean into a place of discovery and conversation.

2nd Place: WhereAbouts by Liam Mason

Whereabouts turns the world into a playground for exploration and quick thinking. In this AR game, players are dropped into immersive scenes from different corners of the globe and must figure out where they are. Each guess comes with risk and reward—the closer you land, the safer your score, but a wrong call will cost you. With every round, the challenge builds, pushing players to rely on both intuition and knowledge to stay in the game.

3rd Place: Snake and Ladder by Vivek Thakur

Snake and Ladder brings the timeless board game into mixed reality with a lively new twist. Players roll the dice to race across the board, climbing ladders to leap ahead while avoiding snakes that send them sliding back. Fast-paced and full of surprises, the Lens reimagines a classic favorite as an interactive experience packed with energy and excitement.

Runner up: GenAI Gravity Gun by Alex Bradt

GenAI Gravity Gun transforms your hand into a powerful tool for creating and playing with virtual objects. Using voice recognition, players can generate any object they imagine through the Snap3D API, which then appears with realistic physics.

Pinch to grab, release to throw, and watch as the object collides and interacts with the world around you. With gestures, voice commands, and physics all working together, the experience turns everyday spaces into a playground for creativity and fun.

Runner up: Super Ships by Andrew Douglas

Super Ships turns your surroundings into a live battlefield in a fast-paced arcade shooter. Enemy ships spawn directly onto the surfaces around you, pulling the action right into your play space. Players can choose between two game modes: Planet Defence, where you place planets and guard them from swarming attackers, and Wave Mode, where the challenge is to survive against endless waves of enemies.

Lens Update Category

⭐ The Lens Update category invites you to revisit and enhance an already published Lenses, adding new features or refinements to unlock monetization and gain extra visibility.

1st Place: Bplane Adventures by Pavlo Tkachenko

Bplane Adventures brings a fresh take on the relaxing flow-based game for Spectacles, now featuring four unique seasons with custom 3D assets and VFX, three new seasonal damage types, and a mid-game bonus level.

The update also adds revamped sound design, a refreshed UI, an overhauled leaderboard and achievements, and a witty AI NPC that reacts to events and highlights seasonal details. Real-world calendar integration and updated difficulty logic make every flight feel new and engaging.

2nd Place: DGNS World FX by Guillaume Dagens

DGNS World FX lets users bend reality with 12 real-time GLSL shaders fully projected onto their physical environment. The v2.0 update brings a major leap in functionality and style, featuring a redesigned UI with stylized controls, multi-page shader selection, a built-in music player, and an in-Lens tutorial overlay.

New interactions include a Pyramid Modifier for adjusting shader parameters, a reset button, and surface-specific projection toggles. Six new shaders, optimized performance, and an original soundtrack by PaulMX complete the experience, making it more immersive and dynamic than ever.

3rd Place: Fantastic Fragments by the SunfloVR Team

Fantastic Fragments lets players use their hands to grab components and rebuild the world in a unique spatial puzzle, like a jigsaw brought to life. The latest update adds Testing Tides, a new ocean-themed set of puzzles, and a Global Leaderboard, letting players compare their completion times with the top three players worldwide in every world.

Open Source Category

⭐ This category welcomes open-source Lenses on GitHub, including those using Experimental APIs, giving you the freedom to push boundaries and break new ground without requiring Lens Explorer publication.

1st Place: DGNS World FX by Guillaume Dagens

DGNS World FX lets users transform their surroundings with 12 real-time GLSL shaders projected onto the physical environment. The latest update delivers a major upgrade in both functionality and style, making interactions more immersive and visually striking than ever.

The Spectacles Community Challenge #5 has once again shown the creativity, innovation, and passion of the AR developer community. From immersive experiences that push the boundaries of storytelling to playful games that turn everyday spaces into interactive playgrounds, these Lenses demonstrate the incredible potential of AR glasses.

🏆 Congratulations to all the winners, and thank you to every creator who participated—your work is helping shape the future of AR, inspiring others, and proving that the possibilities of AR are truly limitless. 🫶

P.S. The submissions for Spectacles Community Challenge #6 are still open! 🤭 Join here.