Wage Love: Ancestral Dance is an AR meditative experience that reminds us that the wisdom of our ancestors is a powerful tool for healing and restoring balance in the world around us.
3rd place winner in the June 2025 Snap Spectacles Community Challenge.
Project Details
Role: Developer, Interaction Designer
Development Platform: Lens Studio
Published on: Snapchat Spectacles
Programming Language: Javascript
Features: Voice Recognition, Hand tracking, Multiplayer
Inspiration & Concept
I had the pleasure of teaming up with Heather Dunaway Smith and Dulce Baerga to create a piece for the MIT + Spectacles Community Hack at AWE in 2025.
Heather does a beautiful job explaining the piece. “It is a shared augmented reality ritual created for Snap Spectacles that invites participants into a ceremonial space where the past, present, and future converge. Inspired by ancestral wisdom and the urgent need to heal Mother Earth, the experience asks users to reach back—calling forth the spirits of those who came before to move, remember, and transform together.”
What drew me to this collaboration was exactly that invitation. There is something profound about using technology not to escape the present but to reach into something older and bring it forward.
Development Process
As with most Hackathons, we had a limited timeframe to bring it all together. I’m really proud of the way we split up tasks to ensure we made the deadline. I was the lead developer and assisted with some of the interaction design that Heather put together.
This is was my first time creating a multiplayer project. We all lived in different areas, so we weren’t able to test the functionality in person until the actual event. For ease of demonstration, we debuted the experience in single player mode, but later revisited the project to tweak the multiplayer functionality. Getting voice recognition and hand tracking working together in a shared experience was the biggest technical challenge, and honestly one of the most rewarding things I have built.