Science has narrowed the line between reality and virtual.” AR and VR two leading agile technologies are an excellent example for this statement which are transforming view of digital world as we have never imagined before. Using VR gadgets as a bridge between reality and virtual world consumer’s experience has increased exceptionally, on the other side AR is merging reality and virtual world and opening new dimensions in research, education, gaming, social media and various other sectors. Making AR a new way of communication and sharing emotions, Snaappy, an Augmented Reality company, creating 3D animated characters which help to express emotions when words are not enough.
Below are highlights of the interview conducted between Insights Success and Snaappy:
What led to the inception of the Snaappy?
Snaappy was founded about 4 years ago as a totally different company than it is today. We started as a messenger for younger audience with many sophisticated visual and artificial intelligence features. Although, we had experienced an organic user growth, it didn’t quite meat our initial expectations. Two years ago, we decided to use our 3D visual characters and broader our vision to a full blonde social network based on proprietary Augmented Reality technology.
Describe your company and its cutting-edge VR/AR services which address all the needs of your customers.
Our company is B2C AR first, which means we are providing tools to end consumers so they could create, and share unique AR content such as videos, messages, location-based content etc. These days we are launching our first B2B AR services, allowing brands to take advantage of our AR content creation tools to launch innovative AR marketing video campaigns on different social platforms created by their own audience and their own 3D AR assets. The first few marketing campaigns will be launched in China in a few weeks.
Could you throw some light on your mission and vision statement?
Our vision is to build an eco-system of consumer products based on AR technology. We have started our journey with an AR social network at first and gradually we are adding more products. Now we are working on our second product as well which is a full AR game that is connected to the social platform. We hope that within a few years we could lead the AR landscape for social, entertainment and gaming, whether it is on mobile or on wearables.
How does your AR/VR services unique from the other companies’ offerings?
Our AR services are very different in vision and tech than any other AR services currently provided. I would like to focus on just 2 main points which I think are the most relevant ones:
AR angle – we are building AR features based on a SLAM engine which are being used only through the back camera. Most of the famous, successful services that are decorating themselves as AR (like Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram etc.) are built on face detection technologies which are utilizing the front camera. If one should look ahead to the near future, one would see that mobile AR is only a temporary phase towards the real wearable AR vison.
We take AR very seriously and we try to look at it as a serious content creation tool and not merely a gimmick. When we analyzed the worldwide AR market, we found that most companies are investing their resources in creating a small amount of astonishing AR experiences that users might adore in a first glance but will never repeat it twice. We are looking at it from a totally different angle, we prefer to have far more AR experiences (we have more than 60M at the moment and counting) so every user who will launch our app could use it to tell their own story using the AR props they need and not tell the story that our product engineers want them to tell like on any other AR platform out there. In that case users understand they have much more freedom in Snaappy than on any other AR competitor (even at small quality cost).
Give a detailed description of the featured person’s influence over the company and the industry.
As Snaappy’s CEO, Gal is leading the vision, product, business development and marketing efforts. Gal is highly involved with the day to day activities, creating the AR philosophy and making sure the company will align with it. Furthermore, Gal is an experienced AR speaker, mobile speaker as well as an opinion leader who is lecturing all over the globe in front of different audiences about the present and future of AR.
What technologies are you leveraging to make your services resourceful?
We are working with many different technologies. The main ones are AR, AI, location and 5G. Most of the tech is being developed in house, except of the 5G that is being developed alongside selected telecom partners.
What are your company’s future aspirations? What strategies are you undertaking to achieve those goals?
We want to become a world leader in the consumer AR space within a few years, specifically in the AR software apace (social, entertainment and gaming). Our strategy is to enhance short videos creation process to introduce AR use cases, benefits and best practices to the mass consumer market.
Gal Shvebish | Co-Founder & CEO | Snaappy
