AI video creator Pika Labs has joined the recent rush of new and upgraded tools by releasing Pika 1.5, a revamped model with a bunch of new features. These visual effects, or “Pikaffects,” as the company refers to them, come about a year after the initial debut of Pika 1.0. The timing of the release, right after rival models like Runway Gen-3, Hotshot, and Luma Labs’ Dream Machine 1.5, suggests the competition to dominate AI videos is far from over, even as people await a wider release of OpenAI's Sora model.
Pika 1.5 ups the photorealism and gives more camera control to users, with some pretty impressive results. But the Pikaffects are definitely the showstopper tools, with bizarre changes to physics that seem to blend into the reality of the video even if they would be impossible to film in real life. A new button in the Pika interface opens up the list of options for what to do with objects in the video. So, you might want to see a dog inflate like a balloon and float away, see a castle melt like butter, watch a sandwich get crushed, a car explode, or a kitten get squished. You can do all of the above using buttons with the respective verbs on them. It doesn’t happen out of nowhere, either. The buttons cause hands to come in and squish the cat, or a hydraulic press to crush the sandwich.
