E120 - Inside Cookmate: Developing for Snap Spectacles and The Futures of Smart Glasses with Kanzul Fatima Arif from Headraft

Not much is known about Snap’s next device, except what CEO Evan
Spiegel shared last year during their annual Lens Fest. The device
promises to be better, smaller, more beautiful, and so on. Sure :-)
If there is one person outside of Snap who is best positioned to
know what’s going on at the company and how they work, it might be
Kanzul Fatima Arif. As the Head of Innovation at Headraft, she
worked closely with Snap to develop Cookmate, a hero project for
the American social media and XR leader, which is showcased
whenever possible. That is because the app truly impresses with its
stellar user interface on the 5th generation Snap Spectacles. While
developing Cookmate, Kanzul and her team worked so closely with
Snap that she was actually able to influence their development. For
example, how pinned objects behave, how fonts are readable best of
the Spectacles or how face tracking works for diverse skin tones.
At the beginning of this episode, Kanzul tells us her personal XR
story: the moving and empowering journey of an Afghan woman who
discovers the power of AR to process her own history. She also
provides a deep dive into how Headraft handled the shutdown of
Spark AR and the situation with 8th Wall and what the agency's
strategy looks like now. Finally, she describes in great detail how
the team developed Cookmate, which meant stepping away from
traditional game development methodologies.