Tiktok is experimenting with lidar-controlled AR effects
No time right now?
The lidar scanner of the iPhone 12 Pro should enable the smartphone camera to better orientate itself in space. This is of particular benefit to AR features. Tiktok makes a first suggestion of what the app will do with it.
AR effects are popular. After the Snapchat app, which is particularly popular due to its myriad of funny and less funny photo filters, was at the forefront of offering a first AR filter based on lidar for its users, Tiktok is now following suit.
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Tiktok and Snapchat are experimenting with lidar AR
With a gold ball, which most closely resembles a piñata, but is supposed to symbolize the ball, which traditionally sinks in New York’s Times Square at midnight on New Year’s Eve to represent the countdown to the new year, Tiktok wants its mostly young users to be a bang to get started the year 2021.
The ball is positioned virtually in the middle of the video recording. It seems to be attached to the ceiling with a kind of pipe. During a countdown that starts at five, the ball continues to slide, only to burst when it reaches the bottom of the tube.
In addition to four balloons that form the number 2021, glittering gold confetti is released, which slowly falls to the ground. The data from the lidar scanner now ensures that the confetti remains on surfaces. It only works really well on the ground.
To ring in 2021 we released our first AR effect on the new iPhone 12 Pro, using LiDAR technology which allows us to create effects that interact with your environment – visually bridging the digital and physical worlds. We’re excited to develop more innovative effects in 2021! pic.twitter.com/6yFD2FfHta
– TikTokComms (@TikTokComms) January 6, 2021
Snapchat has already shown an AR filter that mutates a room into an overgrown area. While the user is aiming his camera at the surroundings, plants seem to grow on the surfaces, crawl up the walls and frame cupboards. Colorful insects float through the room, the ceiling is provided with points of light.
Neither the Tiktok nor the Snapchat effect are convincing due to their excessive closeness to reality. But we get an impression of what the lidar scanner could do – with the right applications.
Lidar measures light on its way to and from objects
The functional principle is quite simple: the scanner measures how long it takes the light to hit an object in the room and to reflect it again. The resulting data theoretically allow a no less accurate impression of the environment than the human eye can produce. In the case of the iPhone 12 Pro, the data is evaluated and processed using artificial intelligence.
If you have an iPhone 12 Pro, you can find a handful of apps in the app store that use the lidar scanner. The fun factor should be with the game Hot lavathat you can play within the arcade flat rate will be the highest.
