Kygo partnered with Snapchat to spice up his sets with AR lens

Enter into a new show experience as Kygo partnered with Snapchat to spice up his sets with AR lens

In April this year, Norwegian DJ, music producer, and songwriter Kygo partnered with Snapchat to bring a new experience to festival performances.

“We’re delivering a new Snapchat Lens synced in real-time to his performance, enabling a fan’s phone to bring them deeper into the experience without taking them out of the moment.”

First of all, it’s worth noting that perhaps the biggest problem most people have with parties these days is that many people are recording videos during a festival and ruin the experience. This comment is certainly understandable, but recently Snapchat and Norwegian global star Kygo have recently rethought this in a joint collaboration. Perhaps they’ve asked the question: What if we could spice up the atmosphere of the show a bit with special effects? While the recipe isn’t new, as there have been previous attempts to use smartphones in the environment to display Augmented Reality (AR) elements during parties, Kygo and Snapchat’s partnership is something different. A good example of the former might be to show only static shapes during the concert, or even to change them at most from track to track – see Alicia Keys’ “Empire State of Mind Keys to the Summer Tour AR Lens” collaboration with Snapchat. But in the latter, the lenses for Kygo’s concerts will accompany him through the AR, whatever he plays. The first such show took place in front of 22,000 festival-goers at Gunnersbury Park in London on 12 August, followed shortly afterward by Ushuaïa Ibiza. But in October, for example, the lens can be used in another big show at the Great Pyramids of Giza in Egypt with Tiësto and Kungs, among others. The AR lenses for the collaboration were made by Plai, a studio in the UK.

“Kygo is a highly innovative artist who is always pushing the boundaries of how an audience can experience a live DJ set, so it was a no-brainer to bring Snap’s augmented reality to his shows this summer,” added Manny Adler, Snapchat’s head of music strategy.

In conclusion, while understandably not everyone is happy about the use of phones at festivals, in fact, such collaborations and experiences can be good for technological development in the long run, but only with healthy use so as not to spoil the fun of others.

Image Credit: Johannes Lovund / Provided by VANESSA MENKES COMMUNICATIONS