Snapchat Originals uses AR and feedback for the user's engagement

I'm standing on a beach and a group of beautiful women in their twenties gather around a bonfire. There is Dylan, a passionate dreamer, who strums an acoustic guitar in his millennial pink hoodie. And Summer, she's an ambitious life lover, who wears the red Chuck Taylors that fits his jacket.

I know their names and personalities because their origins float above their heads. And in case I have not said it clearly, I'm not really on the beach in Orange County. I'm in my basement and watching the scene via a Snapchat AR "portal" that plunges me into a 360-degree moment that looks like a mix between a relaxing beach party and a trailer for a new TV show. MTV reality show.

This effect is by design. The experience I was watching is part of a new Snapchat show called Endless summer, produced by Bunim-Murray, the same production company that brought us The real world. All of this is part of Snap's continued obsession to leverage its own interactive social platform to advance the nature of programming.

This week, Snap unveils its largest original programming initiative to date. Nicknamed Snap Originals, it includes a dozen new programs produced especially for Snap, ranging from a horror anthology to a mysterious campus mystery created by a writer of Riverdale, to a docuseries on drag queens who arrive at adulthood.

Snap's content was not all successful – after a controversial overhaul, in particular, its publishers reported losing views. But over the past two years, Sean Mills, head of Original Content for Snap, has become a successful platform for the company. He quickly pointed out that the usual television viewing style was more the same as that of YouTube's unique videos. The SportsCenter show on Snapchat attracted 2.5 million viewers and the audience of NBC News has doubled in Snap over the past year, from 2.5 to 5 million viewers per day. This is a little bit of Snapchat's 188 million daily users worldwide, but places the number of Snapchat viewers of NBC at par with a hit show.

With its new content broadcast, Snap does not just want to duplicate TV shows or Netflix nonsense. Whatever the position of its stock, Snap wants to do something more ambitious: to advance the medium of storytelling, taking advantage of its advances in AR and its social platform.

"What we have done in the past has been a lot of defining the format, looking at the mobile as a new medium and defining the DNA of how to tell stories," Mills said, referring to to the company's success in vertical full-screen introduction. video and snapshots, which are now pillars of mobile content consumption. "But I think the next level for us is about the interactive article: how to make sure that the audience is more of a participant in the story, and less a passive spectator?"

The above Endless summer The portal is a step in this direction. Snap's own engineers worked with the show's creators to film a 360-degree video scene, which she then added to audio and dimensional graphics that allowed a person on Snapchat to roam the stage like if she was inside. Well done, Mills imagines that these scenes will not be punctual promos, but will be an integral part of the lived experience.

"What I like from the idea of ​​the portal's goal is that we can film really critical moments of the series and allow a user to get out his phone, Open her camera, open the gate, literally get off her couch, get to the scene, look around and participate in a show, "says Mills." I could imagine looking at these characters around the campfire, playing the guitar, maybe there's a love triangle. "

For the original Snap Class of lies, the portal takes a different form. This is not a filmed scene, but an all-digital environment, like a video game, that lets you explore the dormitory in which the protagonists of the series live, bringing your phone closer to the surfaces to inspect photos or other plays in search of clues. The technology builds on Snap's resounding success with its AR front-end filters and universal lenses. But the company wants to go beyond puppy selfies and explore how this fundamental technology can create next online experiences not to be missed.

For the moment, you will enter these portals by sweeping at a key moment of the show. But if Snap discovers that these portals engage its audience, the company imagines that they do not need to be complementary to the programming; they could be programming itself.

"Right now, they are additive. They may be more part of the story, and eventually you have stories in a series of five portals, "says Mills. "You solve a crime, or watch two people fall in love, where the whole show is lived in this virtual world."

Of course, Snap is not limited to new experiences. the company must take advantage sharing experiments to keep its ping-pong users around the application. Another new interactive element he introduces is that of reactions. Just as people film videos of reactions to various shows and even on YouTube, a pivotal scene in Endless summer will invite the user to slide up to film and share his reaction – green-projection their face on the Endless summer background.

This is an example of the power of Snap programming in that it exists on such a standalone platform, where consumption and media creation can be unclear to make it one and the same. Snap can become not only a content channel, but also where you are talking about content. It's like folding the final of the HBO season The iron Throne on Twitter – where fans are talking wtf arrived at Jon Snow-in one platform. This combination is powerful because Snap can work with program creators to create an interesting programming moment to share and make it shareable.

"What I would like to see evolve is that a user will have an option to react to any scene at any point in the series," Mills says. "I do not want to bid on the same shows that are visited in the city by people touting their production budgets, I work with artists who want to decipher the code on a new medium."

Indeed, if it's clear when discussing with Mills during the Snap Originals development process, it's because Snap knows that some of his ideas may fail. But society still recognizes that it has the most mature platform to advance mobile storytelling in new ways, interactive, strange and perhaps irresistible. That is, as long as Snap users like what they see.

"I could tell you that I have this very clear vision, but what is dangerous is that I do not want to have a vision that does not fit what the public wants," says Mills. "I think we're just starting to experiment with these things. The next year or the next two years will be very exciting for what we can try. "