Snapchat’s scan feature can identify dogs, plants, clothes, etc.

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Snapchat’s camera has so far been mostly associated with sending out zany disappearance messages and augmented reality effects, like a virtual dancing hot dog. But what if it does things for you, like suggesting ways to improve the look and sound of your videos? Or show you a similar shirt based on the one you’re looking at?

Starting Thursday, a feature called Scan is upgraded and placed in the front and center of the app’s camera, allowing it to identify a range of things in the real world, like clothes or dog breeds.

Scan’s strong placement in Snapchat means the business is slowly becoming not just a messaging app, but a visual search engine. Scan also solves a growing problem for Snapchat users: how to find the millions of AR effects, or Lenses, created by the community of Snap creators. With its ability to suggest Lenses based on what you’re looking at, Scan could bring more visibility to the Lenses people make, inspiring them to keep creating AR content for Snapchat.

Visual search is not a new idea. In 2017, Google launched Lens, allowing users to scan items through their phone’s camera and identify them using its extensive search results index. Lens is built into Google Pixel phones and a number of other Android phones, as well as Google’s main mobile app. Pinterest also has its own visual search feature called Lens which displays similar images based on what you scan into the app.

Even though Snap is catching up, it arguably has a better chance of embracing the idea of visual search into the mainstream. Since Snapchat opens up to the camera, any change has big implications for how its nearly 300 million daily users interact with the app. Snap says more than 170 million people already use Scan at least once a month – that was before it came to the fore on the camera as it does now.

“We really believe that the scan will be one of the priorities of [Snapchat’s] camera in the future, ”said Eva Zhan, Camera Product Manager at Snap. The edge in an exclusive interview. “In the long run, we see the camera doing a lot more than it can do today. “

Snap started working on Scan a few years ago after observing how Snapchat users embraced scanning profile QR codes as a way to add friends to the app. After initially working with Shazam to identify songs and Photomath to solve math problems through his camera, Snap added the ability to identify items available for sale on Amazon.

This latest version of Scan, which Snap previewed at its developer conference earlier this year, adds detection of dog breeds, plants, wine, cars, and nutritional information. Most of the functionality of Scan is provided by other companies; the Vivino app is the originator of the wine scanning function, for example. Soon, Allrecipes will power a scan feature that suggests recipes to prepare based on a specific food ingredient. Snap plans to continue adding more capacity to Scan over time using a mix of external partners and what it builds in-house.

The biggest novelty of Scan is a shopping feature designed by Snap and aided by its recent acquisition of Screenshop, an app that lets you download screenshots of clothing and purchase similar items. Scan can recommend similar clothes based on what you look at and allow you to buy clothes you discover. Scan’s purchase feature will also soon be added to Snapchat’s camera roll section called Memories, allowing people to purchase clothes based on what they’ve recorded from their camera or their snapshots. screen.

Another central pillar of Scan is what Snap calls Camera Shortcuts. It works by recommending a combination of camera mode, soundtrack, and lens. So if you point the camera at the sky, the lenses specially designed to work with the sky will be displayed alongside a song clip and color filter, allowing you to apply all the changes at the same time. According to Zhan, Snap is working on adding camera shortcuts to rival TikTok Spotlight, potentially allowing a viewer of a video to quickly jump into their camera with the same setup used to create the video they just watched.

I found Scan’s camera shortcuts fun at first, but they’re currently limited to just a few situations: shots of the sky, human feet, dogs, and dancing. Snap plans to expand the situations in which camera shortcuts work over time, and the integration with Spotlight shows how they could become a more integral part of the video creation process.

Snap wants Scan to be an important way for users to learn about AR lenses in the future. He recently started letting his AR creators tag their lenses with relevant keywords that will help Scan suggest the right lenses based on what the camera is observing.

After testing the new Scan for the past two weeks, I found it to be hit and miss. There have been many instances where Scan identified things incorrectly or not working at all, such as when he didn’t recognize that there were clothes that I was trying to get results for, and also times when it worked perfectly. Sometimes the suggested goals were relevant, and other times they were clearly not contextually recommended at all.

That said, Snap promises that Scan will improve over time, both in its ability to pinpoint things and with new categories of objects it can detect. No scan data is currently used for ad targeting, but it’s easy to see how the feature could make money with more commercial or ad links down the road.

Digitization becomes more compelling in a future world with people wearing AR glasses, like the latest Snap glasses. To me, it doesn’t feel natural to point my phone at real-world objects to identify them, but the behavior makes more sense if I’m wearing smart glasses that can scan my surroundings.

Snap is already anticipating this: the new glasses have a dedicated Scan button on the frame that triggers the lenses based on what the wearer is looking at. (The new Shows are not available for purchase. Instead, Snap gives them to certain creators and AR partners who request access.)

While Scan is now fairly straightforward, it shows how Snap is changing camera use cases. Snap sees Scan as an important part of Spectacles – and potentially other cameras – going forward, according to Zhan. “We certainly don’t want to limit Scan to the Snapchat camera alone. “

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