Apple Clips Leverages TrueDepth Sensors on iPhone X to Bring 360-Degree Selfies

Apple has upgraded its Clips movie-making app with a list of features to enhance your videos. There's also an iPhone X-specific feature - the new Clips version has a Selfie Scenes feature that allows you to capture 360-degree selfies using the iPhone X's front camera. The Cupertino company has also added specific effects from Star Wars to uplift your clips.

The very first change that you'll notice after updating Clips on your iPhone is the new streamlined interface. The giant record button is still located on the monitor, but the app now has a dedicated Effects browser that lets you quickly pick filters, labels, stickers and emoji characters for your videos. The app now also has labelled buttons that help you edit your raw footage at a faster pace than ever. Additionally, there are full-screen browsers to give you more space to select the best picks from your photo library or the provided animated posters.

If you own an iPhone X, or at least, have access to the latest iPhone model through your friends or family members, you can experience the highly innovative Selfie Scenes on the upgraded Clips app. The feature includes as many as 10 Apple-designed scenes that all add an augmented landscape using the TrueDepth camera sensors of the iPhone X. There are unique locations, characters, colours and visual styles alongside two scenes from Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

The Clips app uses the TrueDepth system to transform the original background of the subjects into the virtual scenes - similar to how traditional video editors add custom backgrounds using a green-coloured chroma key compositing. Notably, each of the scenes available on Clips offers a full 360-degree experience. This means your clips will not look like a sham when you share them with your contacts. Also, Apple has added environmental sound effects to each of the available scenes to deliver you a completely immersive experience.

In case you're not convinced with the Selfie Scenes feature, the new Clips version has new artistic effects that use some machine learning efforts and a style transfer technology to add effects such as moody oil painting, vibrant watercolour, or elegant pencil sketch - all in a real time, right while recording the clips. There are also a bunch of content from Disney, including full-screen posters with Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse, which expands the previous Disney stock that was debuted in July. Likewise, the app has Star Wars stickers with the animated version of Princess Leia, Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader and Chewbacca among others. You can also pick from 16 new Apple-designed stickers and 21 new royalty-free soundtracks that come preloaded with the app. The soundtracks particularly adjust the length of video clips to ease the editing process further.

Lastly, the upgrade brings iCloud integration within the Clips app. This means you can now access and edit your Clips videos directly from iCloud. The app also automatically upload and backs up your videos to Apple's cloud access to help you record a clip on an iPhone and finish its editing later on an iPad. Similarly, there is even support for Shared iPad to let you create your videos even on shared hardware.

You can download Clips 2.0 directly from the App Store. The app is compatible with iPhone 5s, iPad Air, and iPad mini 2 and later models running iOS 11.1 and above. But the Selfie Scenes feature is limited to the iPhone X, and the artistic style transfer effects are available on iPhone 7 and later models and 2017 iPad Pro.