Recently, Josh, a short-form video app known as India’s “TikTok” with 150 million monthly active users in the country, partnered with FaceUnity. With FaceUnity’s complete AR video effects solution, Josh offers users high-quality beauty effects, filters, stickers, cartoon Animoji characters, interactive mini-games, and other creative features, making short-form video creation easy and fun for more than 100 million users in India.

Josh’s parent company, VerSe Innovation, often called India’s “ByteDance,” operates the country’s largest content aggregation platform. In July 2020, VerSe Innovation made a major move into short-form video by launching Josh to compete for the market left open after TikTok was removed. Josh quickly attracted large numbers of users and creators and became one of India’s biggest short-form video platforms.

According to Sensor Tower, Josh quickly surpassed 150 million monthly active users and attracted more than 200,000 content creators. India also has more than 350 million online video users overall. Bain Capital projected that by 2025, about 650 million Indians would spend roughly an hour a day watching short-form videos, three times the number in 2020 and second only to China. Market research firm Redseer predicted that Indian short-form video platforms could generate US$2.5 billion in revenue by 2025.

Josh’s strategy is to capture the market left by TikTok as quickly as possible while attracting non-English-speaking users outside India’s major cities. The challenge is to keep more users engaged on the platform and encourage a steady stream of high-quality content.

After extensive technical review and comparison, Josh’s parent company VerSe Innovation selected FaceUnity’s complete AR video effects solution. The solution provides a comprehensive set of face and body technologies, including beauty effects, filters, stickers, cartoon Animoji characters, and interactive mini-games.

Beauty effects and filters help Josh users feel more confident on camera and enable ordinary users to create high-quality videos. This encourages them to upload more, substantially enriching Josh’s user-generated content (UGC). Engaging stickers, cartoon Animoji characters, and interactive mini-games add further ways to play: users can trigger effects with their eyes and fingers, compete for scores in mini-games within videos, and share more eye-catching content.

To meet local needs in India, FaceUnity also designed a series of video effects and stickers for Josh that match Indian users’ aesthetic preferences. FaceUnity’s FU Creator editor allows creative platform developers to customize, package, and debug AR effects in real time, efficiently tailoring capabilities and expanding interactive features. It has been welcomed by many creators on Josh.

As video effects become more diverse, FaceUnity’s purpose in developing AR video effects remains to identify user pain points and solve them through technical innovation. FaceUnity has long worked to combine computer graphics with artificial intelligence. Soon after its founding, it launched AR video effects technology and an SDK for real-time 3D face tracking and facial animation. Through continuous iteration and improvement, its products lead the industry in maturity and breadth of functionality. They have been adopted in live streaming, short-form video, photography, social networking, marketing, online education, and many other industries, giving more users the ability to create new content and helping build a richer content ecosystem.

Today, FaceUnity has built deep technical expertise in digital humans and digital objects, developing full-stack digital human technology and a complete range of digital human products. It has also worked with more than 2,000 customers worldwide, with business spanning over 200 countries and regions and more than 20 industries, including finance, automotive, mobile phones, and live streaming. Its partnership with Josh, India’s largest short-form video platform, further demonstrates its global service capabilities and leading technical expertise. Looking ahead, FaceUnity will continue pursuing its goal of being a “builder of the metaverse,” developing the foundations of people, objects, and environments to help partners solve practical problems, reduce costs, and improve efficiency.