Generating interactive messages with asynchronous media content

#A content sharing platform may receive millions of messages from users desiring to share media content such as audio, images, and video between user devices (e.g., mobile devices, personal computers, etc.). The media content of these messages may be associated with a common geolocation, a common time period, a common event, and so forth. Conventionally, a first user sends a message to a second user or to several users, and the second users or several users can view the message. The second user or several users may then create a new message and send the new message to the first user or other users.

#Various ones of the appended drawings merely illustrate example embodiments of the present disclosure and should not be considered as limiting its scope.

#FIG. 1 is a block diagram showing an example messaging system for exchanging data (e.g., messages and associated content) over a network, according to some example embodiments.

#FIG. 2 is a block diagram illustrating further details regarding the messaging system, according to some example embodiments.

#Systems and methods described herein relate to generating interactive messages with asynchronous media content. As explained above, typically in a messaging system, a first user creates and sends a message to a second user. The second user receives the message from the first user and then creates and sends a new message back to the first user, or to other users. Example embodiments allow for interactive messaging that allow users to interact with each other via an interactive message. For example, a first user may create a message using personal media content, such as capturing a video of himself. The first user may send the message to a second user. The second user may view the message that has the first user's personal media content and then add her own personal media content, such as a video of herself. The second user may send the message with the first user's personal media content and the second user's personal media content to a third user, back to the second user, or to several users. The third user may view the message that has the first user's personal media content and the second user's personal media content and then add her own personal media content, such as a video of herself. The third user may then send the message to one or more other users. In this way, the message is passed from one user to the next and each user is able to contribute to the message. These asynchronous experiences can be captured in an interactive message.

#An interactive message may be a predefined message (e.g., videos, images, etc.) with a plurality of objects associated with different areas or characters in the interactive message for which users may add personal content (e.g., band members, game players, locations in a scene, etc.). For example, an interactive message may be a video of a band playing that has an object for each band member. Users may be able to add an image or video of their face to the face for each band member.

#One way to send an interactive message with personal media content from one or more users is to recompress the interactive message each time personal media content is added and then send the interactive message as one file to another user. For example, when the second user adds her personal content to the interactive message, the computing device would generate the interactive message by using the interactive message received from the first user and overlaying the personal content from the second user and then recording the entire message as one file. This method, however, may result in a very large file size which may not be suitable for sending and receiving by computing devices, such as mobile devices. Moreover, the inventors found that recompressing a video several times results in compression artifacts. For these reasons, example embodiments utilize the original personal content from each user to recreate the interactive message each time it is generated by a computing device receiving the interactive message. Moreover, example embodiments allow for a portion or subset of an image or video to be recorded (e.g., just a face of a user) for an object in an interactive message, to reduce file size for the images and video. Accordingly, example embodiments provide for a more efficient system by using smaller file sizes, and for higher quality messaging by using original personal content.