Yandex Launches Augmented Reality Short Video App

Internet, October 14, 2019. Yandex (NASDAQ:YNDX), a technology company that builds intelligent products and services powered by machine learning, has launched a short video app for fashion and style. Called Sloy, Russian for ‘layer’, the app allows users to create short videos with automatically recognized tags for items of clothing or footwear, and share them in the app.

Sloy users can create 90 second videos in any genre, from fashion to unboxing, and use the app’s video editing tools, filters, masks, special effects and music tracks , before uploading them to the app. Sloy also lets people follow other users or brands by choosing them from their personalized recommended content feed.

"With Sloy, the augmented reality will completely change the way we interact with style and fashion, allowing us to try things on virtually and opening new social layers for communicating with our friends and subscribers,” says Daniil Trabun, head of Sloy. "This concept brings the opportunity to not only follow fashion trends on social media, but also explore the world of style with an AR-enabled app. AR apps will also open a new market for brand advertising targeted to young audiences in digital reality.”

Based on advanced computer vision technology developed at Yandex, Sloy automatically recognizes and tags items of clothing in a video. By clicking on a tagged item, users can view videos with a similar wardrobe item uploaded to the app by other users and automatically retrieved by Yandex’s cutting-edge machine learning technology. Users can comment on all tagged items and save them to their collection. They can also create their own collections made from similar items or discuss a specific clothing or footwear items with others on the platform.

Today hundreds of bloggers with million-strong audiences on other social platforms contribute their content to the app. Sloy is the first AR-based social media video app dedicated to fashion and style, which was designed for the Russian-speaking audience, and Yandex’s first app aimed at 12- to 25-year-olds.

The app is currently available for iOS devices, with an Android version scheduled for release in early 2020.

Contacts:

Media Relations
Evgeniya Ponomarenko
Phone: +7 495 739-7000
E-mail: pr@yandex-team.com