Augmented Reality For Trying On Makeup Is A Booming Business

“Sure, that looks great on a model, but how will it look on me?” Now you can find out thanks to ModiFace, an augmented reality startup that’s quietly grown to power apps for 55 of the top makeup brands like Sephora, P&G and Unilever.

Fire up the camera on your phone or a store makeup counter’s tablet, choose different styles of lipstick, eye shadow or whatever else, and ModiFace applies them to your skin in real-time on your screen. Move around, wink and smile, and you’ll see your new style without the work or cost.

ModiFace can also simulate hair changes, anti-aging treatments and more. You can tryits web, iOS and Android apps here.

In stores, ModiFace’s virtual makeup mirror is increasing sales by 31 percent because customers are more confident they’ll love what they’re buying. That’s why brands are paying $200,000 to $500,000 a year to integrate ModiFace’s augmented reality tech into their own apps.

And it all started with Botox and military research.

From Lip Reading To Lipstick

“I was a grad student at Stanford working with the defense industry on lip tracking for lip-reading at a distance,” says ModiFace founder and CEO Parham Aarabi. The electrical engineering PhD had invented a technology that could track how someone’s face moved. But it wasn’t until he was approached by pharmaceutical giant Allergan that the consumer use case came into focus.

Allergan makes Botulinum toxin, or Botox, a neurotoxic protein that can be injected into the face to smooth and prevent wrinkles. Allergan commissioned Aarabi to build a version of his software that could simulate the impact of Botox on a prospective customer’s face. It worked, and the ability to preview people’s tighter skin made sales shoot up.

With $500,000 in seed investment and the cash from Allergan, Aarabi launched ModiFace in 2007 and started signing cosmetic brands. Suddenly, it’s a hit. ModiFace grew from 10 to 55 partners in just the last year.

Facial Precognition

Here’s the secret sauce behind ModiFace’s 25 patents. First, the startup brings in models with different skin colors and puts them under dim, medium, and bright lights as they try on a company’s makeup for real. ModiFace’s scanners teach the app how the makeup should actually look, generating an algorithm for virtually applying it on anyone.

ModiFace offers a variety of showcase apps, or you can find its tech in apps from L’Oreal, AmorePacific, Yves Rocher and, starting today, Jane Iredale. ModiFace’s tech has powered apps with 100 million total downloads to date.

Now it’s battling Image Metrics, PhotoMetria, and other competitors. The space has heated up since Apple acquired fellow augmented reality facial tracking startup FaceShift in November. Aarabi tells me his company is pushing to increase frame rates so its virtual makeup stays in place no matter how you move. Meanwhile, it’s trying to better prove how it boosts sales on mobile, not just in stores.

The face race is worth running. The global cosmetics market hit around $500 billion last year. Big brands will pay for whatever helps them sell more makeup. Aarabi explains these companies already cough up $100,000 for a single page ad in Vogue magazine. And that just shows what makeup looks like on someone else. Augmented reality technology like ModiFace unlocks the true purpose of cosmetics: expressing one’s ideal self.

Comments

Peel Turns Your Apple Watch Into A Universal Remote Control

Does it make sense to use your Apple Watch as a remote control for your media devices? Smart remote maker Peel thinks so, having just launched a universal remote control application for the Apple Watch which lets you operate over 400,000 models of home electronics, including not only televisions, but also DVD players, and even audio and streaming devices, like the Roku. The Apple Watch app is actually an extension of the company’s existing smart remote app for iPhone . And while in a few cases the new Watch app will allow you to control your devices via Wi-Fi, for the most part, it will require the Pronto hardware just like the iPhone version does. The Pronto 360-degree IR blaster is what turns the iPhone, and now the Apple Watch, into a smart universal remote control. A $49.99 piece of hardware about the size of a salt shaker, Pronto sits in your entertainment center to provide the IR capabilities required to operate your TV and other electroni...

How to Install and Uninstall Graphics Tools in Windows 10?

Windows 10 has included some optional features which are in-built in the operating system but not installed by default. The Graphics Tool is one such package. The Graphic Tools are needed for users who use Visual Studio to develop DirectX apps or games. The tools have many utility like Graphics debugging, tracing Direct3D calls, inspection of parameters, analyzing Direct3D calls, experiments with shaders and many more. Visual Studio has a Graphics Frame Analysis tool that operates on graphics debugging log. It also collects all necessary information to draw Direct3D calls. The Graphics tools also consist of GPU Usage which lets you analyse and track GPU use in real time and at the same time collects and analyzes the timing data of the workloads. Steps to Install and Uninstall Graphics Tools in Windows 10? 1. Open the Start Menu, go to Settings and tap on System . 2. Go to Apps and features . 3. In the right panel, tap Manage ...

What is your preferred smartphone screen size

Screen envy. We all have it. Or do we? See, that’s the thing, I’m just not so sure. One thing I am sure about is that our phone screens have gotten progressively bigger and bigger over the last few years. The funny thing is, we as a society have taken that ball and run with it, like we just don’t care. But I always thought we did care? Some time ago, when phones were in the sub-5” range, we used to have a term called “phablet” which described an almost absurdly big phone. The definition varied from person to person. I always considered a phone with a screen 5.5” or bigger to be a phablet. The Galaxy Note fell into that category. The Lumia 1520 certainly did. There are others as well. I was safely ensconced in the 4.5” area at the time with my Lumia 920. What did I know? Leon’s getting laaaaaaaarrrger But slowly, phones started topping the 5” mark. I’m not talking about phablets here, I’m talking about normal flagship phones – the Galaxy S4 (barely) and the HTC One (M7) are ...

Barnes & Noble is killing itself

I’ve been chronicling the slow demise of B&N for years now, watching the company bleed out, drop by drop, until it has become a shell of its former value. B&N was a cultural center in places without cultural centers. It was a stopover on rainy days in New York, Chicago, and Cleveland and it was a place you could go to get your kids’ first books. That’s mostly over now. On Monday the company laid off 1,800 people. This offered a cost savings of $40 million. But that’s particularly interesting. That means each of those people made an average of $22,000 or so per year and minimum wage workers – hourly folks who are usually hit hardest during post-holiday downturns – would be making $15,000. In fact, what B&N did was fire all full time employees at 781 stores. From a former employee: On Monday morning, every single Barnes & Noble location told their full-time employees to pack up and leave. The eliminated positions were as follows: the head cashiers (those are the pe...

Google, Microsoft, Mozilla And Others Team Up To Launch WebAssembly, A New Binary Format For The Web

Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and the engineers on the WebKit project today announced that they have teamed up to launch WebAssembly, a new binary format for compiling applications for the web. The web thrives on standards and, for better or worse, JavaScript is its programming language. Over the years, however, we’ve seen more and more efforts that allow developers to work around some of the limitations of JavaScript by building compilers that transpile code in other languages to JavaScript. Some of these projects focus on adding new features to the language (like Microsoft’s TypeScript) or speeding up JavaScript (like Mozilla’s asm.jsproject). Now, many of these projects are starting to come together in the form of WebAssmbly. The new format is meant to allow programmers to compile their code for the browser (currently the focus is on C/C++, with other languages to follow), where it is then executed inside the J...

Exciting Technology

Search This Blog