NekoChan — a fully-offline Japanese cat lens for Spectacles

We released Spectacles-NekoChan (ネコちゃん) — a Snap Spectacles lens where a 3D cat sits in your space and, when you tap it, shares a piece of trivia in Japanese about native Japanese breeds (ジャパニーズボブテイル, 三毛猫), folklore (招き猫, 猫又), and Japan’s cat islands (猫島 — 田代島, 青島, 相島).

It’s cute on the surface, but it’s really a reference build for two things that are quietly hard on AR glasses:

• Running fully offline. Every fact is bundled with the lens; nothing is fetched over the network, and the Internet capability is never requested. It works in airplane mode.
• Rendering Japanese correctly. A subsetted Noto Sans JP font (~305 KB, only the glyphs the app uses) ships inside the lens, so every kanji and kana renders instead of showing tofu (□) boxes — a common failure when non-Latin text meets a size-constrained AR runtime.

It also sticks to stable APIs only (Text, AnimationPlayer, the Spectacles Interaction Kit, LSTween, Audio), and includes the tooling to regenerate the font subset and offline narration when you edit the content — so relocalizing it is a documented, repeatable step. Source on github.com/IoTone.