Voice postcards, carried by a cloud — across any language.

Cloudove is a spatial, asynchronous messaging experience for Specs, built in Lens Studio 5.23 for the CLAD Summer Hackathon — Week 3: Connect.

A kawaii messenger cloud flies to you, listens to your voice message (or lets you type it), and carries it to a friend anywhere in the world. When your friend opens the Lens, the cloud arrives with a tiny heart-cloud in tow, announces who wrote to them, and unfolds a two-sided holiday postcard: the front is a geometric travel poster of the sender's homeland with its place ribbon, and the back carries the message translated into the receiver's language, with a matching country stamp and signature, while the cloud reads it aloud in a natural voice.

Every message is view-once: reply or close it, and it is gone forever — like a real postcard handed to you, not a chat log.

How it works

1. Choose your language on a giant postcard: 12 language pills, each hover previews that country's stamp in the dashed franking box and greets you in that language. On selection the postcard flips to a travel poster of your destination and drifts away in a gentle zigzag.
2. Sign in with your email (typed on the system keyboard — AR keyboard on Spectacles). Your account gets a friendly NUBE-code you can share.
3. Compose: record with the microphone (ASR transcribes as you speak) or type it. Review, re-listen, delete, or send.
4. Address it to a friend's email or NUBE-code — no public user list, fully private.
5. Receive: the heart-cloud flies in, the cloud announces the sender, and one tap opens the postcard. The message is translated to your language and read aloud. Reply flies straight back to the sender.

Tech

• Lens Studio 5.23.1 / Spectacles Interaction Kit (SIK)
• AsrModule — on-device speech transcription (40+ languages, auto-detect)
• OpenAI via Remote Service Gateway — gpt-4o-mini-tts for the cloud's voice, gpt-4o-mini for message translation
• Snap Cloud (managed Supabase) — accounts, private addressing, message queue, view-once deletion
• 12 languages end to end: Español, English, Français, Português, Italiano, Deutsch, 日本語, 한국어, 中文, Русский, العربية, हिन्दी — every UI string, prompt, stamp, and travel poster
• Original kawaii cloud artwork by Florencia Raffa

Backend

The messaging backend runs on Snap Cloud (managed Supabase): user accounts, private addressing, and the view-once message queue. The hackathon Snap Cloud project is bundled so the experience runs out of the box. To point it at your own project instead: Supabase plugin → Import Credentials → assign the generated asset to the CloudMessaging script's Supabase Project input, then run snap-cloud-setup.sql in the SQL Editor.

Running it

1. Open Flying Messages.esproj in Lens Studio 5.23+.
2. Press play in Preview, or send it to Spectacles.
3. Pick a language, sign in with any email, and send a cloud to a friend (or to yourself with a second email).

Credits

• Concept, art direction, cloud mascot & UX: Florencia Raffa
• AI pair: Claude (Anthropic) through CLAD and the Lens Studio MCP server — see CLAD-LOG.md for the full development log

CLAD Summer Hackathon 2026 — Week 3: “Build a spatial experience that connects people, platforms, or everyday communication workflows.”