How a Snapchat AR Creator Is on Track to Earn Nearly $500K This Year – Business Insider

Hart Woolery, a former software engineer, creates Snapchat augmented reality lenses.  One of Woolery’s most popular filters — a Harry Potter lens — got well over 60 million views. Woolery is on track to earn nearly $500,000 in 2022 from AR lenses. For serial entrepreneur Hart Woolery, designing Snapchat lenses started as a personal challenge. The software engineer, who studied electrical and electronics engineering at UC San Diego, spent three months in 2017 developing an augmented reality hand puppet before pitching the project in a cold email to billionaire Mark Cuban. “I just kind of Googled around and found what could have been his email,” said Woolery, who taught himself the basics of AR development. To his surprise, Cuban not only expressed interest in Woolery’s AR hand puppet, but invested $100,000 in it. (Cuban has since invested an additional $400,000.) Woolery used those funds to establish 2020CV, a small Snapchat AR lens design studio in San Diego specializing in creating — or recreating — visual effects from movies. His clients now include some high-profile names, including Warner Bros., Disney, Comic-Con, and the Dallas Mavericks, whom he charges anywhere between $5,000 to $20,000 per lens. Snap released Lens Studio, a free application for building AR…
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