Daily Times

Snapchat has just launched its first substantial new feature following its successful IPO last month.

The selfie-sharing app is rolling out “world lenses” that will let users put colourful graphics in front of real-world landscapes.

The graphics use the same augmented reality approach as popular smartphone game Pokémon Go.

If you tap on the camera screen whilst in the Snapchat app, you’ll bring up the lenses. Snapchat says the options will change daily. At the moment you’ve got the choice of a cloud, a rainbow, a floating “omg” and flowers.

Once you’ve picked your lens and placed it where you want, it will be created inside the app. Walk forward in real life and it gets bigger, step back and it gets smaller.

This makes it different from just flat stickers that you can superimpose over an image and marks another step forward into augmented reality.

Interestingly, the announcement of the new feature comes on the first day of Facebook’s F8 developer conference.

Considering that Facebook has pilfered most of Snapchat’s features for its own apps , you can expect to see this effect show up in Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger in the next few months.

Snapchat is an image messaging and multimedia mobile application created by Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown, former students at Stanford University, and developed by Snap Inc, originally Snapchat Inc.