Facebook has updated Messenger with new camera features ahead of the holiday season. The standalone Messenger app now has support for looping Boomerang videos. It’s the video looping effect that became very popular on Instagram first and the company is now bringing it to Messenger as well. There’s also another new camera mode and augmented reality stickers.
The addition of Boomerang and Selfie Mode means that there are now five camera modes in total on Facebook Messenger. Boomerang can be used for looping videos while Selfie Mode is best for automatically blurring out the background in, you guessed it, selfies.
Facebook has added new holiday-themed filters and augmented reality stickers to the app as well. That’s a good addition before the holidays as plenty of users will be utilizing Facebook Messenger to keep in touch with their loved ones over the holidays.
All of the camera modes are sorted in a scrolling bar at the bottom when the camera is active in Messenger. Users can thus scroll through the different camera modes – Boomerang, Normal, Video, Text, and Selfie – to choose the one that they want to use. The camera layout is similar to its other apps such as Facebook proper and Instagram.
Facebook says that these new features will be available to the majority of Messenger users globally starting today.