Snapchat Rolling Out New Lens That Can Help You Learn ASL: All You Need to Know

Highlights:

• Snapchat launches a new lens to help you learn American Sign Language.
• The feature teaches you to fingerspell your name with individual letters through the lens.
• The new Lens was built using Snap’s evolving hand-tracking technology.

Snapchat has been around for over a decade now. Despite many social media platforms copying some of its core features, it still manages to come up with new ideas and implement original features. It’s true that it might not be as relevant today as it was in past years. However, it still has a solid base of users who appreciate its presence and continued development. Snapchat has partnered with SignAll to launch a new AR lens that helps users learn American Sign Language (ASL).

The feature teaches you to fingerspell your name with individual letters through the lens, along with practicing the ASL alphabet and playing games to put new skills to the test. You can try the new lens on your Snapchat app by either looking for the ASL Alphabet lens or by scanning the lens QR code.

Snapchat creates a tool for users to start learning American Sign Language

The company added, “For native signers, in a world where linguistic inequity is prevalent, we believe AR can help evolve the way we communicate. We look forward to learning more from our community as we strive to continuously improve experiences for everyone on Snapchat. There are various modes to choose from — aimed at different objectives, such as learning, memorizing, etc. Users will need to appear in the camera frame and follow the on-screen instructions.

It announces in a newsroom post that it’s adding YouTube integration to its Creative Kit. This allows users running the latest version of the app to directly attach YouTube video links to their Snaps. The feature works for both Snap Stories and one-on-one Snaps. So now you can attach rich YouTube video links — which other users can tap to watch in the YouTube app or website.

The new Lens was built using Snap’s evolving hand-tracking technology, which provides more capacity for communication, in new forms, via the app. Snapchat used the same technology to power a series of similar Lenses launched last year, as part of International Week of the Deaf, which also encouraged users to fingerspell various words.

It could be a good way to raise awareness and facilitate more inclusion – while Snap’s also looking at further applications for its hand gesture recognition tools, which could help to expand communication options for hearing impaired users. It’s a good experiment, and a great way to get more people more aware of sign language, and maybe at least learn the basics via these examples and games.

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Megha Gupta

Megha Gupta is one of the leading writers of techzimo.com. She is working on Tech Zimo for the last 4 years, Apart from a writing job, she is a professional lecturer in a technology university, Know more about her here on Facebook.