Last August, TikTok opened its ‘AR Effects House’ to select developers. Now, TikTok’s opening it to all creators, albeit in Beta access. TikTok hopes that the expansion will help the platform expand its creative capacity, ideally allowing it to tap into the latest visual effect trends to attract even more users.
Effects are in The House!
As its name implies, Effects House is much like Snapchat’s ‘Lens Studio’ and Meta’s ‘Spark AR’ platform, which respectively enable creators to build AR effects chosen from a range of templates and tools, further simplifying the process.
As TikTok explains:
“Effect House offers tools and learning resources, equipping creators with intuitive design and development technologies that would empower them to build immersive and dynamic effects for TikTok’s global community.”
Starting from your basic effect template, you can then add in various elements to customize your AR effect, allowing you to build almost any sort of image-altering effect that you can think of. TikTok has always been one for individuality, which is why it decided to introduce a new function that encourages pure creativity, as opposed to simply providing users with effects that enhance how they look. Furthermore, effects belonging to the latter have a certain negative connotation to them, which could prove disastrous during unfortunate times.
TikTok notes:
“Effects must follow our Effect Guidelines, which outline additional policies aimed at helping everyone on TikTok feel welcome and empowered to create exactly as they are. For instance, we don’t allow effects that promote colorism or negative stereotypes against protected groups, nor do we allow effects that depict cosmetic surgery, such as lip fillers, or encourage scrutiny of someone’s appearance.”
This is a step in the right direction. Incidentally, the British marketing and public relations company Ogilvy has recently announced that it will now refuse to work with influencers who distort or retouch their faces and bodies for brand campaigns. Ogilvy is doing this as part of its new effort to combat ‘systemic’ mental health harms via Social Media platforms. Last year, former Meta Staff Frances Haugen, as part of the ‘Facebook Files’ leak, shared internal research which showed that Instagram can have significant mental health impacts, especially for young women. Part of this was the clear negative self-comparison and trying to match your looks with those of highly edited photos.
AR effects have added to this, expanding access to such tools. It’s good to see TikTok taking a stronger stance and making a bigger effort in combating the use of AR filters and effects as forms of visual enhancers. Also worth noting is Google’s removal of all filters applied by default in selfie images taken on Pixel devices in 2020. At the same time, Norway passed new regulations last year that requires all influencers and advertisers to clearly label all retouched photos.
The Wrap
These are all small, positive steps taken that could have big impacts later down the line. Though it’s unlikely that any of these would totally stop people from trying to alter their photos for more engagement, it’s also a logical move from TikTok as it looks to become a bigger player in the space.
Likewise, the expansion would also enable the creators of the top effects to monetize their work, partnering with sponsor brands, carving TikTok another path to hopefully start fueling its own creator economy.
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