Snapchat launches AR-enabled Friendship Time Capsule

The fun new feature allows friends that can't be together in person, to create new shared memories through AR on Snapchat.

New Delhi: Snapchat has recently rolled out an AR-enabled Friendship Time Capsule feature that allows users to see how their friendship will look like in the future, in response to findings from its Friendship Report 2020.

This comes after the company Snap Inc. released its second global Friendship study, interviewing 30,000 people across sixteen countries and interviewing global experts, to explore how the COVID-19 pandemic and global issues have impacted friendship.

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The Friendship Time Capsule feature has been launched in response to findings from the report.

The fun new feature allows friends that can’t be together in person, to create new shared memories through AR on Snapchat. The Snappable uses machine learning to allow friends to get a glimpse of their friendship in a variety of scenarios in the future.

Musician and a youth icon Armaan Malik tried his hands on the new feature to reach out to his childhood friend Krish.

“Krish and I go way back; we became friends when we were both in the fourth grade. There are friends, there is family, and there are friends that become family; Krish is that friend for me,” the 25-year-old singer said.

“Even if we don’t stay in touch with each other owing to our busy schedules, we always pick up from where we left off and it’s as easy as it always has been. That’s what true friendship is all about. And, while we can’t be together at the moment, I tried Snap’s Time Capsule Lens to capture some fun moments with him,” he added.

The Friendship Report showed that the COVID-19 pandemic has led to over a third of friendships (globally) being affected in some way.

In India, COVID has further accelerated the importance of digital connections with nearly 91 per cent saying that they have helped friends maintain their relationship, regardless of age. This is much higher compared to the global average.

Nearly four out of five friends, 87 per cent say they relied on digital communication to stay connected through the lockdown in India. For 76 per cent of the ones surveyed, those conversations have been deeper, rather than focusing on surface-level topics. Even though there’s been an uptick in outreach to friends, COVID-19 has also led to loneliness for some Indians. Half of those surveyed by Snap said they’ve felt lonely since the pandemic started, simply because they couldn’t see their friends again, which is 13 per cent higher than pre-COVID-19.

The upside is that, with the pandemic causing so much isolation, people genuinely want to reach out and check in on those they care about. More than half of the people almost 54 per cent say their friendships are more important to them now and nearly three-quarters, 74 per cent of us are making an intentional choice to reach out to friends that they haven’t spoken to in a while This may explain why there was a marked difference between Snapchatters who often communicate visually – and non-Snapchatters – with Snapchatters becoming closer to friends during the pandemic.

Friendship researcher Donya Alinejad describes the importance of visual communication as creating “co-presence” which results in “a feeling of being together when you’re actually physically distant.” Feeling as though we’re actually together is important “for a whole host of reasons,” Alinejad says, particularly “for those who are in need of or require a kind of emotional support.” Looking at the (global) data from prior to the pandemic, Snap found that the single event most likely to strengthen a friendship was taking a vacation together.