Letting your housemate know you are in class or sending your mum a message that you are studying in the University Library? Schippers’ new geofilter makes it look more convincing.
Snapchat’s geofilters say something about your current location. Groningen already had filters containing an image of the Martini Tower, but now you can also send a Snapchat message from the Academy Building, Harmonie Complex, and the University Library with an image of the Academy Building and the text ‘rijksuniversiteit groningen’.
Filter
Schippers had previously made a geofilter for his home town of Den Helder and came up with the idea to make one for the RUG while studying in Groningen. ‘It’s great seeing other people using your filters and when I saw that the university didn’t have one yet, I started making one, partially to procrastinate,’ he says.
With the help of a photo and Adobe Illustrator software, he made an image of the Academy Building and submitted it to the US-based Snapchat. ‘The Academy Building is the pride of the university,’ Schippers says. ‘Because Zernike has a different feel to it than the city centre campus, I thought it best to limit the filter to the most well-known buildings in the city centre.’
He does not know yet whether the filter is popular or not. The University Library did announce his geofilter in their newsletter. ‘I already emailed Snapchat to try and activate the statistics for the filter, but that will take a while. But I can hazard a guess. The Den Helder filter has been sent 35,000 times and has been viewed one million times. Because Groningen is a bigger city with a younger population and I see the filter pop up more often, I think that this filter has about three million views,’ the student says.
Photo: Koen Marée