I did an interview with Raag Harshavat, AR Developer Relations at Snapchat, at Snap’s Developer Conference of Lensfest. See more context in the rough transcript below.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So continue my coverage of Snap's developer conference of LensFest 2025. Today's episode is with Ragh Hashavat, who is AR Developer Relations at Snapchat. So Snap had brought me down to be a judge on their lens-a-thon, which was having 20 different teams of four people each that were developing augmented reality applications, either in the games track, which was more on the Snapchat platform where they're creating these turn-based games, or what I was looking at with the Snap Spectacles for the teams that were developing with the new announcements of the Snap Cloud, which is powered by Superbase. So having a database backend, using edge functions and being able to dynamically load larger asset sizes and to have like more robust experiences and so i was looking at a lot of the spectacles experiences and rod was in charge of the other games track which i didn't get a chance to see as many of but there were some really innovative ways like the winner was actually using your tongue they developed a whole like ai model to control a turn-based game using your tongue as the primary controller So we talk a bit about this idea of using your body as a controller in the context of Snap, but also how they've been really trying to develop and cultivate this developer ecosystem where Snap as a culture is just very feedback driven. They're quickly iterating. They're listening to developer feedback. And so a lot of their future of their technology path has been listening to the developer needs and responding to that. So for covering all that and more, today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Rog happened on Thursday, October 16th, 2025 at the Snap Developer Conference of LensFest happening at the Snap headquarters in Santa Monica, California. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:00.384] Raag Harshavat: Hi, I'm Raag Harshavat. I am AR Developer Relations here at Snapchat. My job is to sort of know who our developers are, to understand how they're working with our software, what works best for them, how to get feedback from them, and make our products better to serve the developers, while also figuring out how they can also monetize and grow their careers and reach their own dreams.
[00:02:26.022] Kent Bye: Great. Maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into this space.
[00:02:29.969] Raag Harshavat: Yeah. So I kind of came from all over. I most recently have been serving roles in partnerships and producing augmented reality experiences. Before that, I worked five years in sports broadcasting, where I did real-time graphics and augmented reality for all sorts of sports broadcasts all over the world. Really learned a lot about that technology and how to tell stories with it. And then originally, I was a filmmaker. So I kind of came from this background of how can we use these new mediums to tell stories? And I try to bring a lot of context of what the history of other ecosystems like film were and try to draw knowledge upon that as I look at a new ecosystem like augmented reality.
[00:03:13.120] Kent Bye: What was it that originally drew you to AR?
[00:03:16.095] Raag Harshavat: Yeah, I don't think I immediately understood its creative power, but I think over time when I started to see the right museum exhibitions and I started to see how even just with a mobile phone you could create experiences that kind of affected the user and made them feel immersed in something and the new feelings it created. It just reminded me of other art forms. To me, it's always been augmented reality is so much more similar to dance and theater and sculpture than it is to maybe film, and yet those mediums are so powerful because they're able to work in any context. Once I just realized all of those powerful things and I started to learn that this medium had so much potential, then it was like, okay. I originally wanted to tell stories and help creators and help develop films, but then I started to see like, hey, this is a new thing and it's doing so much more. So I was excited.
[00:04:09.994] Kent Bye: And then maybe you could just elaborate a little bit more around your role and responsibilities here, working with like AR dev relations and working with the community. Because I know Jesse, I talked to Jesse McCullough and he's community manager. I'm just trying to get a sense of your roles and responsibilities for how you're interfacing with the broader development community within the context of AR and Snap.
[00:04:28.908] Raag Harshavat: Yeah, so I focus heavily on our Snapchat developers and how people use augmented reality to build Snapchat experiences, which can include games, which can include fashion and beauty, just such a large variety of disciplines. But then I also help cultivate their path to potentially up-leveling towards building Spectacles experiences and building the more advanced experiences or ecosystems that help them make more and more money and such. So my job in developer relations is to run developer events across our whole ecosystem, both Snapchat, our SDK, and Spectacles. We view Lens Studio as a tool that can do a lot of different things, and so I think I have the longest eye at just how much variety is our entire community, and I try to cultivate that.
[00:05:17.463] Kent Bye: Okay, and so if we look at the XR industry, a lot of what's happening in VR has been games. And I noticed that this year at the LensFest, there has been an increased focus of having different games and turn-based games. And that was part of the focus of having a whole games track for the developers. Maybe you could just elaborate on a bit of how games are becoming increasingly important at Snapchat and VR. also on the Spectacles, with the Lens Studio. And so I'm just curious to hear, where do games fit into the broader context for what's happening at Snapchat, and why is that so compelling?
[00:05:49.785] Raag Harshavat: Yeah, I think that there's an immediate fit on Snapchat the app, which is a place where you can connect with friends and where you can develop relationships and you can message people. We immediately see that there's a need for people to continue to express themselves to play, and yet Snapchat has a lot of really unique capabilities that maybe another gaming platform might not have. And some of those things might be augmented reality, of course, but the ability to use Bitmojis, which is another fun social thing, and some of our AI tools and some of our communication and messaging. So all of these different aspects immediately create a social experience. And then that just carries over to our other platforms because we're also pioneers in the world of creating mirrored experiences where you're standing in front of a camera and seeing a large TV monitor that displays you and then augmented reality experiences where you can interact with the person next to you or compete with people as well and those real life experiences are really fun and then finally you kind of get to the spectacles where we have connected lenses which allows them to instantly network and where We realized that in the same way that we use the Snapchat app to kind of empower social experiences, you get to see people across from each other in a single room connect in new and unique ways. And so all of it kind of relates towards games seem like a really prime way for two people to communicate and to connect with each other. And that's what our platform is all about.
[00:07:19.386] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's been this interesting evolution of Snapchat being a camera-based company, I think is how I've heard Evan speak around how they identify as a company with Snap and having the camera as a focus so that when you open up the application, you are immediately looking at yourself in like a selfie camera, but that you're moving from that into all the AI filters and lenses that have happened for the past 10 years. It's the 10-year anniversary of all the lenses, but then moving into using your body as a game controller. All that same technology stack now using beyond just what we've used to for gaining input with our abstractions of our game controllers, but now actually using your body as a controller. It seems like that's a distinct thing that I've seen in a lot of different demos here. So just curious to hear any reflections on that, because as you have this deeper level of embodiment that has been an evolution of the trajectory of the platform for Snap and how that is now starting to be fed into these different types of immersive games.
[00:08:18.206] Raag Harshavat: Yeah, I think you're hitting the nail on the head. And I think this is what everyone in XR has been talking so much about, right? It's supposed to remove the extraction layers that we normally would have. For so long, games had to be something you held a controller in your hand with. And that's a skill. It's a learned skill. And so to pass it on to other people, it takes time. If you didn't grow up playing with a game controller, it takes a while to understand that kind of complexity. Snapchat is all about removing those layers and using I mean one of the hackathon projects that we've already started to see was using your they created a tongue model so that you can use your your tongue to shoot things and and that's like just using your phone and that and then there's multiple spectacles apps that use your hands and different gestures all of these things are things that we use every day and so we're so much better at wielding them than your standard controller mechanisms where you have to learn and so by increasing the reactivity of these applications and i don't know we're creating more fun grounded experiences that make people feel more like themselves
[00:09:19.915] Kent Bye: There was an announcement around the camera kit now being a proto open source project or it's open, free to use. There's no branding requirements. And it seemed to be a lot of those applications were more camera based where people are doing face tracking and maybe having a big screen for people to try and make up or different things. Just curious to hear how that starts to fit into the ecosystem of what's happening at Snap because there's the Snap application with Snapchat, but then there's all these other more site-specific location-based things where you have a big screen and other technologies that are available for people to start to integrate some of these technologies. Just trying to understand how you start to make sense of this ecosystem as you're kind of putting out these projects without... any responsibility for branding, but how that is sort of growing a larger ecosystem of developers and other capabilities for the core technologies that you're building.
[00:10:09.589] Raag Harshavat: Yeah, we feel like people who use lenses on Snapchat have discovered a magical experience and that it allows them to connect and play in new ways. And that's something that for ten years we've been pioneering. Using camera kit to put it in real world locations brings that experience to a lot of people that wouldn't normally understand it. and then it creates a social experience in a space. I think as we project towards spectacles, we're starting to see that location-based experiences and building augmented reality out into the real world and using augmented reality to match the digital and the physical, is a superpower that we're trying to wield here. And something like putting a mirror, which maybe a lot of the people that are starting to see it and make funny faces or try on weird clothes, the last word in their mind is augmented reality. They're not thinking, they don't know what those words are, but they know they enjoy it and they know they're having fun. The other side to that is it's an amazing opportunity for developers to monetize because the second we start to scale towards locations that becomes something that our developers we count on them to go to the places that they live and i tell developers all the time like hey like go ahead and take our technology and go to your local stores and go to your local businesses and tell them hey i can bring augmented reality to your store to your retail location to your events and i can do amazing things that are going to make people excited and you can do that today for free and then you can monetize it directly and you can help We're seeing developers grow and we're moving towards a goal of ours, which is for everyone to really understand how magical this technology can be.
[00:11:51.383] Kent Bye: Yeah, one of the really fun exhibits here at LensFest this year is 10 years of augmented reality lenses where you're able to go through and see an evolution of the different lenses over the past decade. And so just curious to hear any reflections of as you go through this exhibit and see all these different lenses that are kind of like mile markers to see the progression over the last decade. And just curious to hear any reflections on when you look at that, what comes to mind to see the progression over the last 10 years?
[00:12:19.400] Raag Harshavat: Yeah, it's incredible. I haven't been here for the entire journey, at least employed in the field. I've been in social AR for about six years. And yet I see that, first of all, everything is so recognizable. You realize what a cultural touchstone that some of these lenses have made. And people don't even remember where they came from, but they remember them. And so that's really exciting. The impact that these are having 10 billion views on some of these lenses like that's exciting. It's become part of that social conscious. And two, you see that they're constantly getting more involved, more immersive and more complicated as we've continued to grow the technology. I mean, what we started with vomiting rainbows And now we're running complex ML models that Snap makes inside in-house and building complete, you know, restylizations of images. And so it's just so much fun to play with how we view the world. And so what's so cool about all of this and watching it is I can tell someone, I meet someone and I say, hey, I work in augmented reality. And they're like, what's that? And I say Snapchat filters and they get it. And even though the knowledge of like full VR devices and some of these other things are not fully percolated amongst the community, people get some of these concepts intuitively, even if they don't know how to talk about them.
[00:13:41.883] Kent Bye: So one of the big themes that I've seen in these filters and technology announcements has been all these different AI features. It's a pretty big part of a lot of the different projects of the hackathon with people integrating different software and services with AI. And so I know OpenAI just launched recently their Sora, which there's a whole disclaimer that when you join, they say everything that you experience on this is synthetic reality. It's not real. You may be seeing people that you know, but it's not actually them in the videos. having this idea of a cameo where you're able to capture your image and likeness and then start to remix and edit that and it seems like that with Snap there's a little bit of a different approach in terms of like things still at this point seems to be like people are embodying different things but I can imagine where There could be future lenses where things kind of go in that similar direction where you're able to control your image and likeness and do these kind of remixes with AI filters. And so just curious how you start to think around for you this navigation of like what is the boundary between what is going to differentiate what Snap and Snapchat is doing with AI, with identity, privacy, with all these things, with... navigating the blending and blurring of all these realities and how you maintain that sense of authenticity and the human connection and creativity and having that touch of humanness, but also explore these potentials of where AI seems to be going.
[00:15:02.697] Raag Harshavat: Yeah, well, I think we're all still figuring it out, right? In many ways, right? Like so much of this is new and we're watching this go. But I already can tell that Snapchat has a slightly different vision in mind because we want to keep the person front and center, right? You know, we're playing with video and AI models just as much as anybody else. We have an amazing teams doing that work. But if you look at one of our first implementations of AI video, we launched these AI video lenses on our new lens plus subscription service. And these lenses essentially take a photo of you and then they implement, for example, a dragon climbing on your shoulder. And so much of the focus on that was like keeping your likeness and keeping you. And so you can send it to your friends and they know who's sending it to them. So already, like we're starting to see that, like what concepts that we can create that keep the core values of the app in mind while we experiment with what could potentially work. You know, if you look at our new Lens Studio mobile application that we've released recently, you know there's a feed similar to asura but like instead you're just seeing lenses on people the whole way through and that's just another example of like yes we're bringing the fantastical and we're bringing ai models and ml and all of this new technology to people but we're doing it in a way that maintains them and they're taking real videos and they're rendering on top of things that they're actually shooting with their camera I think it's just really exciting. I mean, I think that Snap is going to continue to experiment in a lot of different ways, but like all of this new stuff that we're seeing is a way to play. And I think that we're finding products and Snap has been for a very long time, finding products that ultimately make this new technology fun.
[00:16:48.482] Kent Bye: I think one of the things that folks that are in the XR industry and also independent developers, they're looking for new ways to monetize and ensure that they can build a viable business around these different ventures that they're going into. Whenever there's new platforms, they are always looking to see like, what's my pathway to being able to do this? It seems like LBE is one pathway, branded applications and experiences could be another. But just curious to hear around some of the new commerce kit announcements and where you expect that being able to monetize lenses, but also more, I guess, on the Snapchat side, at least at this point, having the rewards program for some folks who are creating lenses that have enough scale to be able to get some payments. And just curious to hear around how you foresee the future of the economy of developers within the context of Snap's ecosystem.
[00:17:32.984] Raag Harshavat: Yeah, I mean, this is something I spend a lot of time with and we have a lot of different product offerings and there's different ways to monetize all of them. So, I mean, if you're a developer building on Snapchat, maybe you're new to Lens Studio, maybe this is your first game engine, maybe these are your things. You're starting to make little lenses and you're starting to realize if they get a lot of posts, they could be part of our Lens Creator Rewards program and you get paid directly out for the performance if they go viral, which is really exciting. could be a really foundational experience for a young XR developer that didn't know that this was something that they really wanted to continue to do. We continue to cultivate that community by hosting contests and challenge tags, which is something that we do every month and we're constantly promoting those lenses. Then if they find themselves continuing to immerse themselves in that monetization, they can move up to playing with the spectacles where they can pay for a subscription and develop on the device and compete in monthly community challenges where the developers in our community compete to build the top lens of the particular month and then they potentially might update that lens in future months and then they're getting paid out cash prizes. And then all of that builds the foundation for where that professionalism of the economy will go which is commerce kit you know will be an opportunity to potentially you know monetize your lenses directly on the spectacles device and as that scales we'll you know we'll hopefully see exciting outcomes but then there's also the way that we've created demand for this kind of service so much of our monetization in our economy comes from brands coming to developers who have shown what they're doing on our platform, and they want to figure out how to use their services to enrich in-person experiences, camera kit experiences, web AR, which we offer for free on our platform, and not to mention, like, you know, just on Snapchat itself. And so there is... a clear view that what we're doing engages people. And I think any time that that happens, there's money and what we're starting to see. And once we start to see the next steps of some of these things, we're starting to see like a really cohesive kind of journey that a creator go on to go from a starter to a middle of the road developer to a, you know, expert developer that makes lots of money on our platform.
[00:19:50.475] Kent Bye: And you just had an awards program here at LensFest recognizing some of the best of Snapchat filters over the past year. And is there a place where people can go to check out all these or any ones that you want to call out for things that really stuck with you of some of the highlights from the past year?
[00:20:04.895] Raag Harshavat: Yeah, so we definitely are going to be doing a blog post that should be up that will have access to some of the categories that we gave out, best utility lens, best game lens, best innovative lens. In terms of things that stuck out, it's really quickly went on the spectacle side. We really enjoyed the trajectory experience, which was created by a developer named Igor Rapsov. And there's such an incredible idea of how to take a story-based game and turn it into brand new mechanics. The whole thing is essentially a portal opens up in the center of your room and you have to throw objects into it, but you have to bounce those objects off other objects that you set up. And so it creates this whole kind of staged gameplay that is really like nothing I've ever experienced before. And it really makes unique use of the fact that It's augmented reality. It's not a VR game because you are literally utilizing, you know, stuff in your home and stuff for that thing. So it's really, really, really cool use case there. And then, you know, we're starting to see with really complex games, our best game lens, Tower Defense by Colonel Gedia, you know, taking some familiar concepts that have been out there, but finding a way to make it uniquely Snapchat with using your friends as all of the characters that come up as Bitmojis, you're starting to see some of the power. And then finally, our winner for best Snapchat lens for this year was by a creator from Turkey named Riya Baraz. And it was called Inner Portal, where we utilized the dual camera, which is we're finally making use of the fact that there's a camera on the front and the back of your phone. And it allows your face to kind of show the reflection of what you're looking at and kind of express in a way and with really cool flowers and just a really cool image and just something that you can't really do anywhere else. So I'm excited that whenever I look at the lenses as I go back over the course of the year, I say to myself, like, So much stuff I saw this year, I never saw before that. And I think that I've had people tell me in XR, who've worked in here for a long time, that we kind of are reinventing the same wheel over and over again sometimes, where like an app that came out seven years ago with some of OGs who have been experimenting in VR on the original Oculuses, they're getting to the quest and people are touting this new thing that actually was started seven years ago. What's really cool about what we're doing at Snapchat is that the technology and the features that we're building are novel and new and utilizing things that haven't been utilized in this format before. And so I see lenses every day where I'm like, oh my gosh, I didn't even know if that was possible. And I think that's where we are right now with spectacles and augmented reality because Not as many companies are focused on like, how do we break new ground, new formats, new ideas? And we have a developer community that literally just sits there and waits for us to release something and they jump and then they're on to the next thing. They're exploring that blue ocean and I see new stuff every day that I'm like, I never would have thought that would have been created. And really, the feeling I have is I just want to share it with more people because I think that what's happening over here is really, really, really exciting. And I just I want more people to see it and come check it out and experience it for yourself. I think as more and more do. And obviously on Snapchat, we see hundreds of millions of users. But, you know, as more people start to see what we're doing on specs, I think they're going to be excited. Awesome.
[00:23:30.176] Kent Bye: Well, Rog, thanks so much for joining me here to give a little bit of a taste of what's happening here at Snap and a sense of peeking into the future is what I get a sense of. And it's a real pleasure to have a chance to meet the wider development community and all the excitement they have for developing both these games and lenses and these spectacle applications. So very curious to see where things continue to go with the consumer launch next year with the Snap Spectacles and also continuing to see where the AR platform is going with Snapchat. So thanks again for joining me here on the podcast.
[00:23:58.615] Raag Harshavat: Yeah, thank you so much, Kent. This was really great.
[00:24:00.816] Kent Bye: Thanks again for listening to this episode of the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
