YouTube Stories, the popular video-hosting platform’s short-form, mobile-only videos akin to Instagram Stories, now supports augmented reality (AR) filters through its latest Augmented Faces API release.
According to a blog post written by Artsiom Ablavatski and Ivan Grishchenko, research engineers at Google AI (a subsidiary of Alphabet, who also owns YouTube), the company employed machine learning “to infer approximate 3D surface geometry to enable visual effects, requiring only a single camera input without the need for a dedicated depth sensor,” in order to achieve “convincing, realistic selfie AR effects.”
The new filters are available for developers, creators, and users who download the latest ARCore SDK, and the effects can be used on YouTube Stories by creators with more than 10,000 subscribers.
While the implementation of AR filters for YouTube Stories is impressive in its own right, Google is acting a few steps behind of its biggest competitors in social media video, namely Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook – all of whom have had AR functionality for years now. The “better late than never” approach appears to be that Augmented Faces may be used as a proof of concept for ARCore rather than Google doubling-down on making YouTube Stories the next big social media feature.
Thumbnail Source: CNET
