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Spatial RealitiesAuthor: Thomas Riedel Language: de-de Genres: Technology Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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E120 - Inside Cookmate: Developing for Snap Spectacles and The Futures of Smart Glasses with Kanzul Fatima Arif from Headraft
Episode 120
Thursday, 29 January, 2026
Not much is known about Snap’s next device, except what CEO Evan Spiegel shared last year during their annual Lens Fest. The device promises to be better, smaller, more beautiful, and so on. Sure :-) If there is one person outside of Snap who is best positioned to know what’s going on at the company and how they work, it might be Kanzul Fatima Arif. As the Head of Innovation at Headraft, she worked closely with Snap to develop Cookmate, a hero project for the American social media and XR leader, which is showcased whenever possible. That is because the app truly impresses with its stellar user interface on the 5th generation Snap Spectacles. While developing Cookmate, Kanzul and her team worked so closely with Snap that she was actually able to influence their development. For example, how pinned objects behave, how fonts are readable best of the Spectacles or how face tracking works for diverse skin tones. At the beginning of this episode, Kanzul tells us her personal XR story: the moving and empowering journey of an Afghan woman who discovers the power of AR to process her own history. She also provides a deep dive into how Headraft handled the shutdown of Spark AR and the situation with 8th Wall and what the agency's strategy looks like now. Finally, she describes in great detail how the team developed Cookmate, which meant stepping away from traditional game development methodologies.
