Video Calls and Shared Augmented Reality

The playable AR group experience

Meta Spark offers the option to publish effects that people can use during Instagram or Messenger video calls. By incorporating multipeer functionality, these effects can become shared augmented reality experiences that are applied to everyone on the call, known as group effects.

In contrast, without multipeer functionality, each instance of an AR effect in a video call remains independent. There are various possibilities for group effects, such as creating AR games for collaborative play during video calls, allowing participants to pass objects back and forth, or building an effect where everyone on the call shares the same background or ambient features. These effects can be made more interactive by enabling participants to change each other’s backgrounds through gestures like tapping or nodding.

Opportunity To Be Solved

Based on our observations, it is evident that maintaining attention and emotional connection during a video call is challenging. However, individuals under the age of 25 tend to engage in shared activities to facilitate more comfortable and connected calls. Adolescents use group hangouts, shared activities, or content to redirect attention from themselves.

In contemporary society, video games have become a more popular platform for Gen Zs and Millennials to establish a sense of community, surpassing work and school. Traditional social media remains the primary platform for building connections.

"ALLMOUNTAIN" EFFECT

In 2021, our team, just as an experiment, made a multipeer effect that blew up the Internet. The idea was simple: two characters, a penguin and a Yeti, would ride boards down a mountain, sometimes avoiding obstacles. The Yeti will have a snowboard, the penguin will have an ice block. The faces of the characters should be replaced with the face of the user.

The effect has received 113 million views, and the average duration of the use of the effect is 1 minute 12 seconds. In total, mankind has spent 258 years communicating using this effect, which shows the enormous potential of multi-peer effects.