Social Brew | Devpost

Inspiration

Social Brew was born from two key insights. First, all members of our team have faced that moment at events like AWE—spotting someone inspiring across the room but feeling frozen in place. You want to connect, but you're stuck thinking, “What do I even say?” That social anxiety is real, and it often stops great conversations before they start.

Second, while Snap’s Lenses have given us delightful AR experiences, they often feel like fleeting moments—fun to use, but hard to build lasting communities around. The barrier to entry wasn’t technical, but was social, where the joy was there but the connection wasn’t.

That sparked an idea: What if we could use Snap’s Lenses to make real-world connection feel effortless and fun? What if AR could break the ice and build community?

Social Brew is our answer—a multiplayer AR experience built for Spectacles that turns networking into a playful, immersive interaction. It helps people discover each other, start conversations, and share meaningful experiences—all through the magic of shared virtual effects. By blending creativity with connection, Social Brew makes meeting new people feel less like a challenge and more like natural and effortless experience.

What it does

Social Brew's virtual cauldron is the centerpiece of the experience. Essentially, it serves as the “water cooler.” It draws people’s attention, brings conference attendees to the same area, and triggers conversation by distributing quests and rewards. To implement a co-located experience, we leveraged Snap Sync Kit. This allows us to display the same cauldron and sync the cauldron state among users.

By approaching one of the virtual cauldrons in the event venue, users can view available quests. A UI let users manage quests and track their progress. Active quest will appear above a player’s head, making it easy to identify who’s open for interaction. Since Snap Sync Kit doesn’t natively support head binding, we implemented a custom solution—syncing each user’s camera world position and dynamically inferring head-anchored objects. This allowed us to display quest markers and effects in a way that felt intuitive and real.

Additionally, we felt inspired by the high-five sample project from Snap. Therefore, we leveraged the high-five gesture to mark the completion of quests, which helps reinforce physical interaction and strengthen human connection. Once a quest is completed, users receive a magical “ingredient” that follows them around.

Bringing collected ingredients back to the cauldron and tossing them into the cauldron will reward players with AR effects that could be applied and worn around the venue.

How we built it

We started with a simple question: Why does meeting new people at events feel so hard? During our initial brainstorming sessions, we talked about what made social interactions feel intimidating and scoped our focus to helping users take the first step to breaking the ice. We mapped out a user flow designed to gently guide people into meaningful conversations.

After our initial ideation, our team split up to each tackle different portions of our experience. Andy built the UI, Jingle worked with the High Five multiplayer experience, Duncan set up the colocated Cauldron, and Swetha explored the different Lenses we could incorporate into Social brew. This significantly sped up our workflow, but led to integration challenges down the line.

As a team, we then met up on the final in-person day of the Snap Hack to put our project together. As a whole, we were able to overcome the integration issues

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest initial problems our team faced was infamiliarity with the Snap Lens Studio. As a new platform, our team had to iterate through the UI/UX difficulties we faced. After this initial hurdle, each of our teammates encountered their own technical issues, some of which include wrangling UI dimensions to both suit our text content and ensure user comfort, and iterating through multiplayer experiences without access to a set of Snapchat Spectacles. A final problem our team encountered was arranging to have a set of Spectacles during our video and demo, as in this vein, our team would like to thank Natasha Gubernov for loaning her personal set of Spectacles to help our team showcase our project to its highest quality.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite working with unfamiliar tools, we:

Learned Lens Studio from scratch
Implemented multiplayer AR syncing with Snap Sync Kit
Built a functioning head marker system with no built-in support.
Designed a memorable experience that blends creativity with real-world connection.

What we learned

We learned how powerful AR can be when used to reduce social friction. We deepened our technical understanding of Lens Studio, multiplayer AR design, and wearable UX constraints on Spectacles. Most importantly, we learned how to move fast, stay flexible, and support one another through a challenging but rewarding creative process.

What's next for Social Brew

Social Brew is meant to bring people together. In the future, we want to:

Expand the quest system with more social prompts and challenges.
Integrate deeper Lens customization tied to user progress.
Refine head tracking and add persistent user identity.
Launch at real-world events to help attendees break the ice in a way that feels genuinely magical