Snapchat’s new ‘Crowd Surf’ feature is the company’s latest bid to combat increasing competition from its main rival Instagram. The feature takes individual clips from different users before combining them together to create a seamless video that lasts longer than the standard 10 seconds.
Crowd Surf is powered by artificial intelligence which can recognize the users that are watching and recording the same concert at the same time. This clever technology is able to piece together all of these different Snapchat videos, no matter the angle, while keeping the audio consistent enough to create a longer clip.
Although still in its early stages, reports from TechCrunch claim that it was tested at a Lorde concert in San Francisco. If you have Snapchat, you can see the end result of this in the ‘Featured’ section below the list of other stories. The button on the right allows you to switch angles, but the feature will automatically change angles as the videos change, too.
Other than this, Snapchat has been relatively quiet about the roll out of its new feature only mentioning that it is based on “in-house AI technology” and will gradually be used for more events like major concerts and speeches.
Who knows if it will help to put them in the lead in their increasing competition with Instagram, which launched its own stories feature and already gained over 250 million users. The hope is that Crowd Surf will encourage users to submit videos in the hope that their clip will appear among Featured stories.
