Dmytro Kucher

Walking navigation for Specs, with the map rendered in world space. I settled on a ~45° tilt after testing the range — laid flat it fights Specs' ray-cast targeting, stood upright it tires the hand. Search is multimodal — hand input or voice; speaking shows a live waveform, then an AI returns a summary with the results. The map stays world-locked while you browse, then becomes a head-locked minimap the moment you start walking, so guidance follows you without holding your attention. I validated these decisions in-headset by generating interactive prototypes with Cursor wired into Lens Studio over MCP. Owned end to end; early preview at AWE 2026.

Video: Snap Newsroom · AWE 2026 keynote · © Snap Inc.

Spatial measurement for distances and volumes, designed around furniture fitting. I committed to manual marker placement after auto-detection proved not precise enough to trust for real fitting decisions — reliability over automation. Results read as numbers anchored in world space above each line. The same Cursor-into-Lens-Studio MCP loop let me test how placing markers by hand actually felt and cut what didn't work. Owned end to end; early preview at AWE 2026.

Video: AWE 2026 keynote · © Snap Inc.

Spectacles had no consistent system-level component for moveable UI. The Container came out of that gap: a frame that wraps UI elements and makes them moveable in AR space. It became the foundation for all system UI on Spectacles.

Schematic recreation · Character rig: Rain by Blender Studio, modified (reposed, animated, lit) · CC BY 4.0

The original cursor rendered at a fixed depth and jumped abruptly when hitting UI — users couldn't build a mental model for how targeting worked. I introduced a proximity-aware cursor that fades in when targeting an interactable object and disappears otherwise, added a visible ray, and defined a depth constraint system. Validated with a controlled prototype study: the new design produced significantly more successful hits.

Schematic recreation · Character rig: Rain by Blender Studio, modified (reposed, animated, lit) · CC BY 4.0

Redesigned the system-level multiplayer UX on Spectacles — moving colocated session discovery from a per-experience feature to a platform capability. Users can now find and join active nearby sessions across all experiences from a dedicated Multiplayer tab in Lens Explorer, with a guided colocation flow to establish a shared coordinate space.

Image: Snap for Developers

Designed the phone-to-glasses casting experience for Spectacles — letting users bring any content from their phone into AR space and interact with it using hand gestures. The cast screen follows the user naturally without being distracting, can be anchored to the world or to the user's body, and returns into view automatically when it drifts out of frame.

Led design and production of the full slate of AR experiences for the Spectacles 2021 launch — a new hardware platform with its own spatial interaction model and input paradigm. Coordinated prototyping, 3D, VFX, and engineering from concept through ship.

Video: Snap Partner Summit 2021 · © Snap Inc.

Led design and production of AR experiences built on a depth map, stereo camera, and IMU pipeline — enabling surface-aware occlusion, motion-reactive characters, and a fully realized underwater world with caustics and procedural coral.

Video: Courtesy of Snap Inc.

Apple reached out to Snap ahead of the iPhone 12 Pro launch. I led the design of the first LiDAR AR experience on Snapchat, solving a 3–5 second initialization constraint through interaction design. Featured on the Apple keynote — 61 million YouTube views.

Video: Snap Lens Studio · © Snap Inc.

Ran the end-to-end production pipeline for Snapchat's 1st party face AR experiences — from stats-driven concept selection through 3D/VFX review, engineering handoff, QA, and ship.

Lenses: 1 · 2 · 3 · © Snap Inc.