TikTok is among those platforms where creativity is highly appreciated.
In a place where most users are youngsters, full of energy, and full of curiosity, TikTok has been the fun destination for many to spend their times to express themselves to the masses through various engaging contents. To make it even more engaging, TikTok is stepping things up a bit.
And that is by introducing what it calls the 'Effect House'.
What this does, is allowing creators to take creativity to the next level.
Effect House is TikTok's own augmented reality (AR) development platform.
It was initially introduced in private beta back in 2021. At the time, the feature was released to only a selected 450 creators.
This time, while still in beta, everyone on TIkTok can use it.
"To broaden the scope of effects, we launched Effect House, a platform that allows anyone to create TikTok Community Effects. Since last fall, Effect House has been in closed beta, but today we’re thrilled to open it up to all creators, designers, and developers from around the world, encouraging them to create new horizons for TikTok’s effects universe," said TikTok.
While TikTok is already known for its extensive library of effects, the launch of Effect House should grow that library to become larger.
This is because with it, creators can build AR effects, which may then be utilized in videos by other TikTok users.
Since its initial introduction, those AR filters have been used in more than 1.5 billion videos and viewed 600 billion times.
"Effect House brings your storytelling to life through powerful, intuitive, and expressive features," explained TikTok on its website describes. "Our built-in capabilities — from advanced tracking to rich interactions — enable you to experiment, create, preview, publish and manage all your effects on TikTok."
When a user has an effect published, the effect will be linked to their account and show up in a designated tab on their profile.
Initially, Effect House requires macOS 10.14 or newer, compatible with Intel and M1 Macs.
But to use it, creators must also follow TikTok's Community Guidelines, as well as 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."
The guidelines also include both technical requirements for CPU, memory usage and frame rate, among others.
At least at this time, according to the TikTok newsroom post, all effect submissions shall be reviewed by TikTok’s Trust and Safety team prior to being published for use by TikTok users.
If the team found an effect that violates TikTok's guidelines, it will be removed.
And if an effect is found to violate TikTok's guidelines after it was published, that effect will also be removed, alongside the videos that use the effect.
"Through the expansion of the Effect House beta, we're looking forward to seeing more of the world's creative builders develop engaging and exciting effects for our global community," TikTok said in its press release.
TikTok's Effect House opens as more social media companies continue to invest heavily in AR.
For example, Snapchat has long devoted resources to its AR Lens studio for creating filters (along with several other AR investments), and Meta with Instagram also has opened its filter creation studio, Spark AR, to the public back in 2019.
By opening up Effect House to all users, TikTok is making itself a direct rival to those two.