News: This Snap Spectacles Game Lets You Grow a Digital Pet in Augmented Reality

While the rest of Big Tech is still moving relatively slowly on augmented reality smartglasses, Snap continues to supercharge its own experimental AR wearable called Spectacles.

The latest demonstration comes from a small game production studio called WabiSabi.

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Led by developer and co-founder Anwar Noriega, who is based in Mexico City, Mexico, working with a team in Los Angeles and Tokyo, WabiSabi has spent the last several years developing innovative mobile games for major clients like Fanta, Coca-Cola, and many others.

The team's Spectacles-based game is called Rocket Cat. The AR-based game gives you a virtual cat that you can feed and play with as it grows over time. However, unlike similar game dynamics, such as the classic Tamagotchi digital pet, because the Rocket Cat lives in AR, the human-to-pet interaction is a lot more interactive.

"The main objective of the experience is to create this bond between you and your pet as in real life," says Noriega, in the game's demo video. "The pet grows, the pet gets hungry, the pet wants to play with you. So it's a perfect companion to experience this augmented world on top of the reality that you are living in."

And while WabSabi is an experienced professional game studio, the team actually developed the game experience in Lens Studio, the software platform from Snap designed to make creating AR experiences easy even for non-developers.

"Lens Studio is basically the best AR framework out there," says Noriega. "It's the most accessible one, the easiest to deploy, the one that has the best tools, and the most optimized for all types of phones and devices. And [it's the] most useful for game development."

Although a wide array of AR developers and digital creators have been given access to Spectacles, it turns out that WabiSabi is part of the Snap extended family. The game studio was accepted into Snap's Yellow accelerator program last year, along with a small group of companies working in the digital innovation space.

So far, the Rocket Cat game isn't available on WabiSabi's Snapchat profile page, but as an early sample of what AR smartglasses gaming will be like via Spectacles, the team's demo is impressive.