Plenty of people aren’t exactly happy with the new Snapchat update, so much so that hundreds of thousands of people have signed a petition to have it revoked.
But while you lament at this new era of Snapchat, there is a new feature that promises to be pretty cool.
Everyone was blown away with Pokémon Go and its augmented reality technology; well, a company called SVRF wants to be ‘the first search engine for immersive content for AR & VR’, and what they’ve produced so far speaks for itself.
If you watched Space X’s Falcon Heavy rocket launch earlier this week and wondered how cool it would be to immerse that experience into either augmented reality or virtual reality, you can wonder no more.
The tech company’s latest filter gives users the ability to put a sort of ‘portal’ onto their Snapchat filter and once they walk through it, they’re in the middle of space watching the midnight cherry red Tesla Roadster flying through the cosmos with David Bowie’s ‘Life On Mars?’ playing.
SVRF Chief Executive and founder Sophia Dominguez told Mashable she wanted to get people to use their phones for something more.
She told the site her vision was inspired by M.T. Anderson’s book Feed, adding: “Everything is AR and VR. People have chips in the brains and it’s all advertising driven. When I read it, I freaked out.
“That’s why I don’t have Facebook because Facebook is that future, but I love the imagination. I knew I wanted to work on whatever is the past the phone.”
It’s not just their ‘Starman’ video that’s doing the rounds on social media, another that has gone viral is walking into a portal with two dancing Pickle Ricks from Rick and Morty.
But if Pickle Rick or Elon Musk’s Tesla doesn’t do it for you, there is an AR version of Flappy Bird that you can play using your surroundings.
Sophia said: “An early version of SVRF was StumbleUpon of VR. After testing we realized people would want to search for their next experience, like now I want to see a snowman or now I want to be in Rome.”
The 25-year-old acknowledged this could be slightly problematic if people are so immersed with checking out the VR or AR that they accidentally walk into oncoming traffic or into a wall.
But despite that, this technology could mean amazing things for the future.