Robert Murphy on developer tools
From Dream It, Build It: Developing Immersive AR with Snap Spectacles and Lens Studio With Bobby Murphy · · AWE XR
“To build lenses, we use Lens Studio, our powerful, flexible AR authoring tool — we've completely optimized the end-to-end experience of developing and publishing lenses so that you can focus on bringing your creativity to life. Because our runtime is embedded directly in Snap OS, you can test your lens on Spectacles in seconds — no need to compile or build and wait.”
On , Robert Murphy, Co-Founder, Chief Technology Officer & Director at Snap, spoke about developer tools during Dream It, Build It: Developing Immersive AR with Snap Spectacles and Lens Studio With Bobby Murphy on AWE XR.
About Robert Murphy
At the 2025 AWE conference, Murphy announced that Snap will launch new Spectacles next year, describing them as "even more lightweight, wearable, and intuitive." He stated that the Spectacles browser will support Web XR in fall 2025, and that the company released new AI platform integrations and tools. Murphy invited developers to join the Spectacles developer program and promoted the upcoming Lensfest event. He also demonstrated an early version of Snap's real-time on-device image diffusion model, saying it is "small enough to run on a smartphone" and that Snapchatters will see lenses using it in the coming months. Murphy announced the launch of Lens Studio 5.0, which he described as a major update rebuilt from the ground up with faster project loading and plugin support. In earlier appearances, Murphy discussed Snap's approach to augmented reality, stating that the company does not use the term "metaverse" internally, calling it "pretty ambiguous." He described AR as "extremely lightweight" and "very accessible" compared to VR, which he called "a very heavy experience." Murphy noted that over 300 million people engage with AR daily on Snapchat and highlighted partnerships through Camera Kit with companies including Disney and Samsung. In a 2014 interview, Murphy credited Google Cloud Platform for allowing Snapchat to focus on product development rather than infrastructure maintenance, saying the platform "scaled tremendously well" and that its feature set grew "almost perfectly in sync" with Snapchat's needs.