Snapchat is taking its popular “lenses” feature beyond our faces.
On Tuesday, the ephemeral messaging app rolled out a new update that includes what it calls “world lenses,” a take on its popular feature that lets users decorate their photos and videos with animated overlays. While the original lenses focused on the user’s face, they now come with a few options to decorate the entire photo or video, not just a person’s face.
For example, users can now can add some snowflakes to a photo of a cold office, or sprinkle some pink hearts on an image of friends at a party. To access the feature, users need to open the Snapchat app to its camera screen, then tap in the middle of the screen to activate the lenses and pick one.
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Snapchat first introduced these animated lenses for selfies in September 2015. It has since added the ability for advertisers to pay thousands of dollars to sponsor a lens.
As part of the app update, Snapchat also added the ability to flip back through a Story, which is a collection of photos and videos that last 24 hours. Instagram, which recently released a similar feature to Stories, already has this capability, as tech new site The Verge points out.
Founded in 2011, Snapchat first exploded as a popular app for teens weary of permanent social networks like Facebook haunting them later in life. Since then, the company has been adding new features like its lenses, location-based filters, Stories, and Discover, which is a hub in its app where users can browse bite-size news articles. Last month, it announced that it is changing its name to Snap Inc. As it prepares to debut its second product, a pair of connected sunglasses for recording short video clips.
