How Snapchat is cooking up the next dancing hot dog

Snap is opening up to more creators. The self-proclaimed camera company released Lens Studio on Thursday as a way for developers to build augmented-reality experiences for Snapchat.

The tool, available as a desktop app on Mac and Windows, is similar to Facebook's AR studio, released earlier this week. Google offers ARCore, and Apple has ARKit. Snapchat is betting designers will want to use its system to build for its community of 173 million daily active users. Snapchat users are quite familiar with AR and have been using it since the app released lenses (or face filters) in 2015.