AR is becoming constantly more available through face filters on Social Media. What happens when you let people enhance their own reality?

 

When Augmented Reality arrived, it seemed like some futuristic technology, that was not going to have an impact on everyday life anytime soon. While it still requires technical skills, it is getting more and more accessible to the public. People are starting to play with it on Social Media and explore its possibilities, not only for research but as a way to create for the sole purpose of creating.

 

Interactive AR filters for everyone

Facebook’s tool for building augmented reality effects, Spark AR, now allows anyone to create custom face filters and other effects for Instagram Stories. The platform was previously limited to approved creators, but by now anyone can create and upload their own AR filters to Instagram.

Of course, there is more potential to Instagram filters than simply pure fun. Some creators see it as goal  to give companies an advantage by allowing their users to engage with their products in new and interesting ways.

 

YACHT – Chain Tripping : AR in music

YACHT 2019 Landscape

 

Indie Rock Group YACHT have always been curious about AI and the ways it could be used the music industry. So when AR filters were huge on Snapchat, the band seized the opportunity to test a potential application of AR in music.

They have spent the last three years working on their new album Chain Tripping, describing their work “a machine-learning generated composition process.” The results shows that AR is not limited to visuals: The group filtered their entire back catalogue of 82 songs through machine learning software and used the midi-data that was fed back to them to produce the album’s tracks.

“AI seemed like an almost impossible thing, it was so much more advanced than anything we had dealt with… And we wanted to use this to not just technically achieve the goal of making music—so we can say, ‘Hey an AI wrote this pop song’—rather we wanted to use this tech to make YACHT music, to make music we identify with and we feel comes from us.”

Find out more about Chain Tripping

 

The 1975 – People

Another band interested in AR is the 1975, who created a whole campaign featuring a music video, a website and Instagram filters using AR.

The group worked with a creative director and a set of digital artists and coders in order to create a sequence of “utopian serene scenes being destroyed and subverted using technology”.

The scenery was created by training a neural network – a sort of machine learning following the structure of the human brain – using stock images and pictures of destroyed landscapes.

The idea was to address “environmental collapse, surveillance culture and the contemporary nihilism that is present on Social Media”.

 

Read more about People

 

 

Article by Iris Writze.