Instagram’s New App Lets You Create Looping Videos

Photography tends to be known for its stillness, but for an increasing number of social sharing companies, moving pictures look like the future. The latest: Instagram’s just-released Boomerang app, a new standalone product that creates gif-like videos.

Boomerang takes a burst of five, sequential photos to create a one-second video that plays forward and backward. “Capture a friend jumping off a diving board, defying physics as she flies back and forth through the air,” says the firm in a blog post announcing the launch. “Transform an ordinary selfie with your friends into a funny video. Get that exact moment your friend blows out his birthday candles, then watch them come back to life again and again.”

Boomerang is available now on iOS and Android and comes just two weeks after Instagram’s co-founder Kevin Systrom told TIME that video would form an integral part of the company’s future. “For Instagram to succeed in the long run, video has to be a core part of not only what we’re good at, but also what the community produce[s],” he said. “So we’re very focused on video. We produced a product called Hyperlapse that lets you take stabilized time-lapse videos. And [that’s] a toe in the water [in terms of] video production tools that might come in the future.”

Boomerang is the third standalone app Instagram has launched after Hyperlapse and Layout.

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