Snapchat Friendship Time Capsule allows you to take “future selfies”.

The company also surveyed 30,000 people in 16 countries to assess the pandemic’s impact on friendships.

CNET Reports.

Snapchat rolled out a tool on Wednesday to allow friends to reconnect via augmented reality during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Friendship Time Capsule uses machine learning to “give users some insight into their friendship in a variety of future scenarios,” the company said in a statement.

To use the tool, open the Friendship Time Capsule, take a selfie, select a year, and send the picture to a friend. The function will bring both people together in different scenarios from now until 2120, e.g. B. visit the moon. Snap machine learning technology will also age friends depending on what year they are virtually traveling in.

Snapchat also summarized the results of a large-scale “friendship study”.

The Friendship Report sheds new light on how COVID affects friendship and what other major life events also affect, including:

• COVID brought some friends closer together, but some of us also felt lonely.
• Friends are our first line of defense against loneliness, and we generally make our best friends in childhood; On average, we’ve known our closest friends for at least half our lives.
• Most of us have lost touch with a close friend since childhood, with the majority wanting to rediscover that close connection.
• While most of us stay better connected through digital communication channels, we need to develop our friendship skills to learn how to maintain friendships over a distance and to reconnect when we lose touch.

Unsurprisingly, the pandemic had a number of negative social impacts.

COVID-19 has led to loneliness for some. Two-thirds of respondents said they have felt lonely since the start of the pandemic (66%) – 8% more than before COVID-19.

Almost half of people (49%) say they feel more lonely when they cannot see their friends. Only a third feel that friends reach out to them as often as they’d like (30%). In fact, a third of people (31%) felt that social distancing had weakened their relationships with friends.

Overall, a third of respondents said that COVID-19 affected their friendships. With just over half who say they don’t feel that close to their friends (53%). And almost half of the respondents agreed with the statement that they “felt further away from friends because they couldn’t spend time in person” (45%).

Conversely, some say they have deeper conversations virtually and value their friends more.

Two-thirds of friends say they use online channels to communicate more than they did before COVID-19 (66%), and for many, those conversations were deeper (49%) rather than focusing on surface-level topics […]

Over a third of people (39%) say their friendships are more important to them now, and almost half of us make a deliberate decision to reach out to friends they haven’t spoken to in a while (48%) .

The study also has good news if there is an old friend you want to reconnect with.

79% of us worldwide have lost touch with a close friend, but it’s encouraging that 66% say they want to rekindle their relationship. In the US, these numbers are higher at 88% and 71%, respectively.

And we would generally respond positively to one of our best friends reconnecting, with the main emotions being pleased (36%) or excited (29%) while a minority are uncomfortable (14%) or suspicious (14%) ) or suspicious (29%). 6%).

The company, of course, suggests that sending a selfie invitation to Snapchat Friendship Time Capsule is a great way to reconnect.

Photo: Harry Cunningham on Unsplash

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