AR · Offline JP

Spectacles NekoChan

A fully on-device Snap Spectacles lens: a 3D cat that shares facts — in Japanese — about native breeds and Japan's cat islands. No internet, no experimental APIs.

Source on GitHub Read launch story

What it is

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

Built on Snap’s Fetch demo, it’s rebuilt as a reference for two things that are surprisingly hard on AR glasses: running fully offline, and rendering Japanese correctly.

Why it’s a reference build

  • Fully local, no internet. Every fact is bundled in a TypeScript array; nothing is fetched over the network, and the Internet capability is never requested. It works with the glasses in airplane mode.
  • Japanese renders correctly. A subsetted Noto Sans JP font (~305 KB instead of several MB) ships in the lens, containing only the glyphs the app actually uses — so every kanji and kana renders instead of showing tofu (□) boxes.
  • No experimental APIs. Only stable modules — Text, AnimationPlayer, the Spectacles Interaction Kit, LSTween, Audio — so it keeps working across Lens Studio updates.

The repo includes the tooling (subset_font.py, generate_audio.py) to regenerate the font subset and optional offline narration whenever you edit the content, so localizing to new text — or a new language — is a documented, repeatable step.

Status

Active. MIT-licensed; source on github.com/IoTone.