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  •   2 months ago

Lens studio, on RDP or VM's, for participants with low end hardware?

Can lens studio work in a remoted desktop(RDP) on virtual machine(VM)?
Is anyone aware of any service with a free tier for VM/container/cloud-desktop capable of running lens studio's system requirements*?
Or if it can also run in windows server environments.

I see there is lens "cloud" but that is obviously for backend features not running studio itself in a "cloud" environment,
and web-builder from what I can tell is for ad-work with a safety limited feature-set.

*System requirements from the download page https://ar.snap.com/download
Windows 10 (64 bit); MacOS 10.13+
Hardware
Minimum of Intel Core i3 2.5Ghz or AMD FX 4300 2.6Ghz or Apple M1 with 4 GB RAM; Intel HD Graphics 4000 / Nvidia GeForce 710 / AMD Radeon HD 6450 or better; screen resolution of 1280x768 or higher
Please make sure that you have the latest driver for your specific graphics card installed

  • 3 comments

  • Manager   •   2 months ago

    Hi again! I spoke with the Snap AR team and they provided this info for you to try!

    "We've not heard of developers using Lens Studio via virtual machines before, but you can try, Lens Studio is free to download and use, it's up to you.
    Lens Cloud is a collection of backend services to expand what developers can do in Lenses with Location Services, Storage Services and more. It is not related to Virtual Machines, you can learn more here https://docs.snap.com/lens-studio/references/guides/lens-features/lens-cloud/lens-cloud-overview. Lens Web Builder you are right is a limited online tool made for ads which cannot be leveraged for this Lensathon."

    Hope this helps and good luck!

  •   •   about 2 months ago

    Thanks Shawni, I ended up having to spend time shopping around for virtual machine services to get access to a gpu instance.
    Since I was rushing over the weekend ended up using google cloud compute engine(GCE) for their free tier, tried microsoft azure but they had too many hoops to get gpu access even AFTER phone&credit-card verifications, GCE took minutes even during the weekend after phone&cc verification and changing billing plan. Estimated billing is like ~$15-$25 for ~2days of access since I wasn't running the machines 24/7.

    Notes:
    For GCE I made a virtual machine(VM) running windows server 2019 with googles "n1-standard-4" instance machine type with 1 Nvidia T4 GPU attached, so specs roughly around a 2ghz cpu 8GB ram with ~16GB-GPU-ram.
    Even with that OS & hardware combination lens studio was jittery and often became unresponsive when adding assets, loading, or saving, and modifying different objects.
    So it made for a clunky workflow but still let me make something submittablein a few days from a very cheap laptop that otherwise could not do any of this.
    On the last day to meet the deadline I had to make new VM copies for different regions in GCE because no GPUS were available for my region which wasted several hours trying to find which region had GPU availability. I chose to up the VM specs to 8 vCPUs and standard ram up to 30GB ram; still with a single nvidia T4 , which seemed to help match what was available for resource requisition.
    And STILL had freezing problems with that much memory though noticeably less, which was a good last-day choice as things like waiting for phone-sync from lens studio, and the lens review approval process during publishing made last minute edits more likely.

  • Manager   •   about 2 months ago

    Hey--That's fantastic to hear!! I'm glad you were able to figure it all out! I'll forward your notes on to the Snap AR team just for their info and curiosity. Best of luck!

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