It’s not quite a photo, not quite a video. It’s a Boomerang.
At least that’s what Instagram is calling its new app that allows users to play around with video snippets in fun ways, creating almost GIF-like bits.
“Capture a friend jumping off a diving board, defying physics as she flies back and forth through the air…get that exact moment your friend blows out his birthday candles, then watch them come back to life again and again,” Instagram wrote in a blog post announcing the release.
Boomerang essentially takes a burst of photos and stitches them together into a mini video that can play forward and backward, then users can take that moving image and post it onto Instagram. The new app goes head-to-head with Apple’s new Live Photos feature found on the new iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, which creates Harry Potter-esque moving images.
You can watch Instagram’s short clip to see how Boomerang works.
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