Skip to main content

TikTok to let you design and publish your own AR effects

Are you sick of augmented reality (AR) effects on TikTok? No? Great, because you’ll be getting more of them. And you’ll get to try your hand at making them too.

On Tuesday, TikTok officially announced the opening of its once-closed beta program for its new AR effects creation platform. With TikTok’s newest effects creation platform, Effect House, you’ll be allowed to create and publish your own effects and apply other user-generated effects to your own content. Effect House is still in beta, but it is now available for anyone to download and use, provided that you have a compatible Mac.

TikTok's newest AR effects creation platform, Effect House.
TikTok

According to TikTok’s official announcement, Effect House lets users build Community Effects, providing the “tools and learning resources” to do so. Such tools include advanced tracking, rich interactions, and the ability to preview your effects. And speaking of learning resources, TikTok has already developed an extensive library of how-to guides and tutorials geared toward teaching new users how to use and make the most of Effect House.

Recommended Videos

But one of the most notable things about the new AR effects creation platform is that the effects created must follow TikTok’s Effect Guidelines which include not allowing effects that “promote colorism or negative stereotypes against protected groups” and not permitting “effects that depict cosmetic surgery, such as lip fillers, or encourage scrutiny of someone’s appearance.”

Please enable Javascript to view this content

In fact, all effect submissions will be reviewed by TikTok’s Trust and Safety team prior to being published for use by TikTok users. If an effect is found to have violated such guidelines, it will be removed. And if a published effect is being used in a way that violates TikTok’s guidelines? It will be removed along with any videos that violated guidelines while using the effect.

Since the initial beta program for Effect House, TikTok says that over 450 effect creators have already published their effects on TikTok. This means you’ve likely already come across an Effect House user-generated effect on the video-sharing app. If you’re using one of these effects you’ll be able to tell because the username of the effect’s creator should be beneath the name of the effect.

Anita George
Anita George has been writing for Digital Trends' Computing section since 2018. So for almost six years, Anita has written…
TikTok is banning campaign fundraising on its app
A person's hand holding a phone with the TikTok app on it.

As we get closer to the U.S. midterm elections, TikTok and other social media platforms have been ramping up changes to their apps and their policies in an effort to curb misinformation and clean up other problems plaguing their platforms. And now, TikTok is issuing a few more changes to its policies that are specifically targeted at political party, politician, and government TikTok accounts. The biggest change? It plans to ban campaign fundraising on the app.

On Wednesday, TikTok published a blog post in which it announced a ban on campaign fundraising and mandatory verification for certain political accounts (in the U.S.).

Read more
This beloved TikTok hashtag just got its own app feature
The TikTok app on a smartphone's screen. The smartphone is sitting on a white table.

A popular hashtag-turned-online-community has its own TikTok feature now.

On Tuesday, TikTok launched a new feature that is dedicated to #BookTok, a hashtag and TikTok community that is centered around discussing books. The new feature allows TikTok users to add links to books in their videos. According to TikTok's blog post announcement about the feature, when users select the links that are posted in the TikTok videos they're watching, the links will open up "a dedicated page with details about the book, including a brief summary. and a collection of other videos that linked the same title." The feature also allows users to save book titles to their profiles' Favorites tab.

Read more
This beloved TikTok feature is coming to YouTube Shorts
Two mobile devices showing two people dancing in YouTube Shorts videos.

YouTube Shorts, the video-sharing website's answer to TikTok videos, is getting a new comment reply feature and with it, looks more like its wildly popular competitor.

On Thursday, the new feature was announced via an update to a YouTube Help thread titled "New Features and Updates for Shorts Viewers & Creators." The announcement was posted by a TeamYouTube community manager.

Read more