Meet the youngsters from smaller cities in India who are making AR lenses for the world

A face painted in green, blue and orange stares back at you from a Snapchat camera, like a collage representing the myriad colours of Holi, celebrated with gusto in India, particularly its North.At another time, one can even grow cat or rabbit ears and whiskers with large eyes. Why, you can even get the colour of the iris changed to blue or golden. A piece of psychedelic art?Nope. These are, in lens creation parlance, filters (static overlays over the camera) or lenses. In other words, augmented reality (AR) animations with the use of 3D modeling, which can be created using tools offered by Snapchat’s Lens Studio or Facebook and Instagram’s Spark AR Studio.That itself would be creative hype, but the joy is magnified in the knowledge that many of these lenses are being created by college going kids from India’s rural regions and are accessed by people across the world.Moneycontrol spoke to four such lens creators, who in addition to being popular campus figures, are also raking in the moolah by working with firms in India and overseas.Take for instance 20-year-old Thakur Vivek Singh, an official lens creator for Snapchat. A native of Madhya Pradesh, he is currently pursuing his final…
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