The Lens Studio asset library is packed with goodies, and that makes it easy to overlook some game changers. These six assets have made a real difference in my Spectacles projects and I wish I’d found some of them sooner.
Asset #1 – Surface Placement
This is one of my go-to assets.
Surface placement allows your users to find a convenient area around their surroundings to start up your spectacles lens. This is important because it clues the user in that they’re going to need enough space to be able to comfortably interact and engage with your spectacles lens.
Asset #2 – Spectacles 3D Hand Hints
This is a wonderful tool to help onboard your user. Sometimes we forget as devs and creators that there’s a lot of people out there who still are unfamiliar with AR and especially unfamiliar with wearable devices like the spectacles. So, this 3D hand hints is perfect because it gives the user a visual indicator of how to interact with different objects in your experience.
Asset #3 – Spectacles UI Kit
If you need buttons, sliders, toggles, whatever you need for your project, you do not have to start from scratch. Check out the kit. Use that as a base. The kit provides UI elements like buttons, text input, and sliders with built in hover and click animations.
Asset #4 – Interactable Helper
The Interactable helper gives you examples and a script to be able to easily make your UI elements functions. The whole point of a button or a toggle or slider is that it triggers something else. So, it provides a bunch of examples of how to do that, and comes with a script that helps you easily set up functionality on your own UI components.
Asset #5 – Access Component
Picture this: you have a sphere that’s blue and you want a button press to turn it red. Sounds simple, but figuring out how to actually access and change that material component in script can be confusing. Access Components gives you examples and a starting point to help take the guess work out of it.
I won’t lie, this one is for the folks who are a little more comfortable with scripting. But it’s worth getting familiar with it because it opens up a lot of possibilities.
Asset #6 – Marker Tracking
This is not exclusive to spectacles, but it does work well with the specs. Marker tracking is really cool because you can take a real world image like a painting or a mural and add digital elements to it. This means you can put the spectacles on, look at a painting on a wall, and have it come to life with animation, 3D characters, audio, and more. It’s just a really great way to enhance a 2D image.
Demo Project
All of these assets can be used separately or in tandem with one another depending on your project needs. I created a downloadable demo to show how the assets can work together in a project.