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Museums and theme parks use Snapchat’s AR for immersive experiences

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The attractions industry is utilising Snapchat for its augmented reality (AR), making a museum or theme park more immersive, and educating the next generations.

Last year, AR experiences were launched between Snapchat and three parks – Disney, Universal and Six Flags.

Park-specific reality-altering lenses were introduced as part of Snapchat’s aim to bring its famous lenses to theme parks globally.

Over the last few years, Snapchat has collaborated on a range of AR experiences, including Mickey and Minnie birthday face lenses, a Superman face lens and a Jurassic Park Bitmoji lens.

Founder of Selfie Circus, Matty Mo, part of the Snapchat accelerator programme, Yellow, hopes to conceptualise and produce physical spaces for sharing on social media.

“We aim to scale unscalable retail and in real life entertainment experiences by enabling our visitors to create and share exciting content from physical spaces on their own social media channels,” he told Forbes.This consumer behaviour creates a viral loop that drives new foot traffic and additional revenue for our customers.

“With the launch of Marker lenses on Snapchat, we can now dynamically program our real-world experiences with contextually relevant augmented reality to keep our physical spaces fresh and encourage repeat visits and content creation by consumers.”

Meanwhile, Holocaust survivors have had their stories documented on Snapchat as part of the Sachor Jetzt project – young German journalists seeking to teach the next generations about the Holocaust by bringing survivors’ stories to a platform used by young people.

“The big problem we see is the Holocaust is not being seen as close in history as it was a few years ago,” Henry Donovan, a member of the Sachor Jetzt project, told The Washington Post.

“We want to be a part of this process of preventing the up-and-coming youth of forgetting what happened.”

Snapchat provides intimacy between viewer and subject

Sachor Jetzt journalists find survivors to interview by working with organisations such as the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles and the World Jewish Congress.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said: “It’s important to see the face of victims and hear their authentic voice.”

“This generation is rapidly leaving that stage of history,” Cooper added. “However we can use social media or other Internet technologies to maintain and present the legitimate voices of the victims, that’s a good thing.”

Technology trends

Elsewhere, customer experience platform Local Measure has announced an integration with Snapchat, allowing those in the retail, hospitality and entertainment industries to surface publicly shared Snapchat content from the app’s Snap Map.

As technology becomes increasingly integral in creating unique and memorable visitor experiences, Blooloop has predicted six attraction tech trends as ones to watch in 2019.

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Bea Mitchell

Bea is a journalist specialising in entertainment, attractions and tech with 10 years' experience. She has written and edited for publications including CNET, BuzzFeed, Digital Spy, Evening Standard and BBC. Bea graduated from King's College London and has an MA in journalism.

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