The six winners of Snapchat’s Lens Fest Awards have been announced. Inês Lúcio, a Biomedical Engineering master’s student at Instituto Superior Técnico, has been awarded the prestigious “Breakthrough Lens of the Year”. Her innovative Head Anatomy Lens promises to help Snapchat’s users study anatomy and has a significant user engagement with over 140,000 views.

” I feel very honoured that such a prestigious community of Augmented Reality (AR) developers chose my lens for one out of six awards. It’s a real boost to keep working hard on this project,” says Inês Lúcio, who is developing her project at the Interactive Technologies Institute (ITI). The development process involved a sophisticated blend of artistic skills in illustration tools and technical proficiency in Lens Studio, Snapchat’s Augmented Reality development tool.

Inês Lúcio’s research interests focus on knowledge maps across diverse interactive media, particularly as impactful educational tools in anatomy learning. Supervised by Daniel Simões Lopes, a Técnico professor, and Renata Raidou (TU Wien), together with Pedro Rodrigues (Egas Moniz School of Health & Science), she plans to refine and expand the lens, covering more aspects of head anatomy, such as nerves and vessels.

The Lens Fest Awards celebrate developers and creators from around the globe who use Snapchat’s Augmented Reality (AR) platform to create groundbreaking AR experiences. The assessment criteria include utility, innovation, technology, and excitement.