What you need to know
- Snapchat has announced its new Cameos feature, coming December 18.
- Cameos will allow users to replace faces in videos with their own.
- It's essentially a way to deep-fake yourself into a GIF!
Snapchat has announced its brand new Cameos feature, which will allow its users to replace faces in looping videos with their own.
Over on its blog, Snapchat posted a quick rundown of the new feature:
Cameos make you the star of your own short, looping videos that you can send to friends in Chat. Whether you're feeling excited, exhausted, or just want to say hi, you can find the perfect Cameo for the moment. You can even customize the captions for certain Cameos to make them your own!
These Cameos will be located in Chat right next to your stickers, and there will be over 150 to choose from on both iOS and Android, with "many more" on the way. To use the feature, all you have to do is hit the Cameos button, take a selfie and then select the scene/video you'd like to appear in. There are even two-person Cameos where you can add two faces!
As reported by TechCrunch, Snapchat has announced that the global rollout will take place on December 18. Some French users have already seen test version of the feature show up in their Snapchat apps, take a look below!
https://twitter.com/gartr268/status/1203080218912739330?
The 150 or so videos feature sound, and there are lots of different scenes to choose from. As TechCrunch notes:
They can show you flaunting your cash, dancing like crazy, falling asleep and tons more. Snapchat will then stretch and move your selfie to create different facial reactions that Cameo can apply to actors' heads in the videos.
This should certainly prove to be an exciting new feature for Snapchat users. It seems very similar to a controversial feature in Zao, a realistic face-swapping app for WeChat. So realistic in fact that it was restricted by WeChat over security concerns. Whilst "deep fakes" as a concept is pretty controversial, Cameos seems to be quite far removed, with enough silliness to stop it turning into a tool for misinformation or abuse.
