Social media is driven by content, be it news, funny cat videos, fan-fiction, or the occasional web novels and almost all its content are generated by the millions of users from around the world in a never-ending quest to flood us with as much content as possible.
Now give those millions of users the ability to edit reality and add the impossible to their regular content and what you end up creating makes the initial flood of content look like a small wave compared to the tsunami that has been unleashed.
This is the effect that Augmented reality has on Social Media and it’s a trend that shows no sign of ending anytime soon. Just taking a look at the usage history of any of the major social media platform you will notice an upwards increase in the number of active users when AR related features where added. Be it Facebook Stories, Snapchat filters, or Instagram Stories, all benefited with the introduction of AR technologies.
The business of Social
This fact is not lost on companies, for instance, Snap Inc. announced new AR-based experiences in Snapchat for creators, partners, and users, allowing them to create and add live animations on moving objects, pets, and people. This means the user can add an interactive AR sticker on a face or object and the sticker will also change as the object will move.
Snapchat’s Lens Studio allows anyone to create and publish their AR content on the platform. YouTube, which has a lot of social media elements, recently added Snapchat-like AR selfie filters for YouTube Stories.
Facebook is another social network where AR ad campaigns and games are generating a lot of buzz. Facebook Messenger has a few multiplayer AR chat games like Don’t Smile and Asteroids Attack. The former is a staring contest where the first person to grin loses and in the latter, users can navigate a space ship with their face. Facebook has made creating AR content on its platform a lot easier for users by integrating 3D filters from Sketchfab with the AR Studio.
It means users can search 3D models and add them directly in their AR project. Sketchfab has over 1,50,000 3D assets which are available for free download under Creative Commons licensing. Creators can also add music from Facebook’s free audio library.
More Ads
Also, advertisers will have to adopt interactive content so as not to lose out on this trend that seems to be here to stay. While developing interactive content, they should continue targeting social media users by developing appropriate content.
The social media users are no longer interested in TV-style ads that try to touch their emotions. This could be keeping organizations that advocate for human rights from advertising their course on social media. However, the AR-based adverts on social media have a bigger potential of touching the viewers and making them contribute towards a course. Therefore, one of the future social media trends to watch is that companies will use VR adverts as the basis for reinforcing customer loyalty.
AR Social Media: Might be Fun
So regardless if its new filters, lens or stories on your favorite apps, AR has integrated itself into our social lives, with more and more features being added each day, this isn’t a trend that is going away anytime soon.why not sit back and see what edits AR will enable us make to the world around us, it might just be fun.
