Snapchat adds Sky Filters that transform the sky in your pictures

Snapchat recently a new feature to their social media app. The feature is called Sky Filters and it automatically detects the sky in your images and then adds a filter on top to completely alter the look of the environment and the sky.

Sky Filters uses augmented reality to do all that. If you use Snapchat then you’ve seen augmented reality in work a lot, through their animated 3D Bitmoji character which can even interact with the environment around you.

Snapchat did start to use augmented reality way back when they introduced face filters in Snapchat Stories before 3D Bitmoji came. This was one of the unique things about Snapchat until most social media apps like Instagram started to offer the same the face filters.

Now, with Sky Filters, Snapchat kind of gets another feature that the others don’t have so maybe people will start to use it more and it might grow to have as many daily users as Instagram which currently has 500 million daily active users. Anyways, Sky Filters will be available when you swipe through filters just like you would when selecting any other filter after taking your picture.

However, Sky Filters will only show up if Snapchat manages to recognize the sky in the picture.The Sky Filters have already started rolling out on both Android and iOS, and you can take a look at the image above to see what one looks like when partially applied to the picture and how the unapplied area of the picture looks like.

According to Snapchat, the Sky Filters will be rotating daily to slot in different virtual weather effects. One day it could add a sunset or a rainbow while another day could have storm clouds or a beautiful starry sky.

Personally, I get excited when I see companies leveraging technology like machine learning, artificial intelligence or augmented reality in this case to bring new ways for people to share content with others. Given how not everyone probably gets excited by such technical aligned stuff, let us know what you think about this new addition.

What features about Snapchat do you like? What other features would you like to see added to the app that could be similar to Sky Filters or even totally different?