Instagram is rolling new updates to Boomerang as it tries to catch up with TikTok in terms of creative effects for video. Boomerang was launched in 2015 and let users create short videos that play in a back and forth loop. With TikTok creeping in on Instagram’s audiences, the Zuckerberg-owned platform has added new features to the Boomerang effect.
- SlowMo lets you slow down your video to half their original speed – they’ll play for two seconds in each direction instead of one second.
- Echo does a double vision effect(blur effect) that makes everything almost like you’re drunk or tripping.
- Duo speeds up and then slows down a video to the beginning with a glitchy, digitized look.
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These new effects can be found when you launch Boomerang and can be applied to videos in your gallery or when you record a video using Instagram’s camera.
🐢 SlowMo
🗣 Echo
👯♀️ DuoBoomerang has new creative twists that'll make you say yaaassssss. Try them all out today. pic.twitter.com/wp0A71RefL
— Instagram (@instagram) January 10, 2020
Another extra feature is video trimming that will let you edit the start and end of the video thus giving Instagram users more control over what they can post.
These effects are already on TikTok, a popular and rival social media app that’s been growing exponentially and Mark Zuckerberg even shared plans to take on the app.
“TikTok married short-form, immersive video with browse. So it’s almost like the Explore Tab that we have on Instagram. I kind of think about TikTok as if it were Explore for stories, and that were the whole app … So we have a number of approaches that we’re going to take towards this,” he said in leaked audio recordings.
“We have a product called Lasso that’s a standalone app that we’re working on, trying to get product-market fit in countries like Mexico … We’re trying to first see if we can get it to work in countries where TikTok is not already big before we go and compete with TikTok in countries where they are big, ” he adds regarding Lasso, another standalone app Facebook is working on.
Instagram Stories are a very popular feature of the app and Boomerang effect is the app’s most widely used feature used to record Stories.
“Your Instagram camera gives you ways to express yourself and easily share what you’re doing, thinking, or feeling with your friends. Boomerang is one of the most beloved camera formats and we’re excited to expand the creative ways that you can use Boomerang to turn everyday moments into something fun and unexpected,” said an Instagram spokesman to Techcrunch.
These features which TikTok already has enabled its users to creatively come up with memes that include users high-fiv-ing themselves using an Echo-esque feature, highlight action-packed moments or loud sounds with Duo-style glitch cuts and conjure an army of doppelgangers behind them with infinity clones effect.
The new Boomerang effects are rolling to users globally – just head over to the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store and update the Instagram app.
