Vomiting rainbows is so 2015. Since Snapchat first introduced its augmented reality lenses, the filters that allow us to vomit rainbows in photos, it has released new ones frequently enough to keep its users hooked. But so far, these AR filters mostly focus on distorting selfies. They allow you to turn yourself into a bug-eyed bunny rabbit or a big-cheeked flower child, or paper something funny—a Jeff Koons statue, a dancing hot dog—atop the physical world.

Now, the company has used those tools to build a deceptively simple product: Today Snapchat introduces games. The first set of these lenses, called Snappables, lets users do things like add friends to a rock band, challenge those friends to an emoji dance-off, or play basketball. Users can interact with the AR games through touch, motion and facial expression. In one completely weird game that I played when I visited the company’s New York office last week, a filter transformed my eyebrows into barbells. I lifted my real eyebrows to raise the barbells. I competed against Eitan Pilipski, who runs Snap’s camera platform and whose eyebrows are gray wisps covering fast-moving practiced muscle, to see who could lift the most. (He won.)

Snapchat has long been the kind of company that’s easy to underestimate. Its users have mostly been adolescents, and kids are fickle. Sure, right now 187 million people use the app every day, according to Snap, but even if they love it now, it’s easy to assume their attention is fleeting. Facebook tends to copy Snap’s most significant advances.

And not everything the company tries works. After Snap rolled out a major revamp to the app earlier this year, designed to make it easier for new users, more than 1.2 million people signed a Change.org petition asking the company to change it back. Despite this, more than a year after founder and CEO Evan Spiegel took the company public, Snap continues to give its users reason to stick around. Those daily users visit Snapchat 25 times a day on average, according to Snap, spending roughly half an hour on the service.

This has appealed to advertisers: over the last quarter of 2017 sales jumped to $286 million, a 72 percent increase over the year earlier. (The company is nowhere near profitable, however, as it’s still investing far more money than it’s making. Spiegel endeavors to keep users engaged by giving them fresh things to play with constantly.)

The new feature is a tiny change to the company’s product, but it’s instructive in discerning Spiegel’s endgame. Later this week, the company will announce an updated spectacles product. While companies like Magic Leap and Microsoft are trying to build the next computing platform in one mind-blowing package—with a headset and software and content that will obliterate their competitor—Snapchat is attempting to piece together that next computing platform independently, from the bottom up by creating hardware and software separately. “We decouple them so that they’re all allowed to develop on their own until they come together,” Spiegel said. “Over the next decade or so, the way that these pieces fit together will probably be what defines our company.”

Snap Snappables aren't just games, they're expanding the way we communicate

As Spiegel sees it, hardware has been holding augmented reality back. There are tough technical problems that no company has cracked completely. Among other things, existing headsets have narrow fields of view, and the batteries, which bulk them up, don’t hold their charge for very long. We still don’t know how these devices will evolve, and whether most people will ever want to wear them. By developing Spectacles separately, says Spiegel, “we can still move forward at a really fast pace empowering very advanced augmented reality products within Snapchat.”