Heads up: Our Ideas Factory has been refreshed, levelled up, and grown-up into Alphero Intelligence. Some of our old posts are pretty cool tho'. Check this one out.
- Instagram filters can get consumers interacting with brands in new and engaging ways.
- In just a couple of hours, by following YouTube tutorials, we were able to create two different filters using basic design tools and Facebook’s Spark AR tool.
- Spark AR is a codeless solution to creating fun augmented reality experiences for social media marketing. Codeless means that it can be done by designers!
With all that “not being able to go places” business that we’ve all had to endure over the past couple of months, social media platforms saw a surge of activity. With that, some features became hits and became the absolute coolest hippest thing with all the trendy cats in the interwebs.
One of those was the new Instagram filters feature. Hits like “Guess the gibberish”, “How much insect are you?”, “What’s your Harry Potter house?” populated our stories and hearts. Which got us thinking in true Ideas Factory fashion: How hard can it be?
Not hard at all really.
Using Facebook’s Spark AR, it took us just a couple of hours of watching YouTube tutorials and implementing our assets to have a couple of filters going.
With hundreds of free-to-use assets in Spark AR’s toy box, just waiting to be played with, a little creative flair goes a long way. Or you can import your own! The tool has many functionalities (including recognising facial features) out-of-the-box which means we can get an idea going quite quickly.
This was all achieved without even needing to pester the development team, demonstrating that no coding experience is required to get started creating funky AR experiences. In future, we’d like to investigate what the development team makes of this as a little Javascript knowledge can extend the logic and interactivity of more complex Spark AR projects. But, for now, we’re happy to have learned that we could achieve so much so quickly.