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

Montana-based mapping startup onXmaps raises a round of funding fit for Big Sky Country

A mapping startup based in Missoula, Mont., which allows users to download sophisticated offline topographic maps outlining public and private lands and a number of other features geared towards hunting, fishing and camping, has pulled in its first major outside funding. onXmaps has closed a $20.3 million Series A round led by Summit Partners. Bessemer Venture Partners, Millennium Technology Value Partners, Next Frontier Capital and NBCUniversal CEO Steve Burke also participated in the round. The company is calling the fundraise one of the biggest ever among startups based in Montana. onX Hunt app This is impressively the first bout of outside funding that the 70-person startup has ever taken since being founded in 2009. The company’s founder and CEO Eric Siegfried, an avid outdoorsman himself, had created a more basic program to integrate these maps with his own Garmin GPS. After finding his friends were interested in having a product like this too, he put down $27k of his...

Best Web Design Company in Pondicherry

#Technology has two faces. We all feel it, but sometimes can’t find words to describe it. #Ebooks are the best example to show the 0-1 nature of emotions the #technology evokes. #itwhere provide a #Best #solutions to #Growyourbusiness feel free to drop a #Mail info@itwheretech.co.in www.itwheretech.co.in

Visa confirms Coinbase wasn’t at fault for overcharging users

Yesterday, we wrote that Coinbase customers were being charged multiple times for past transactions. While some speculated that the erroneous withdraws were down to a Coinbase engineering issue, Coinbase issued a statement saying it wasn’t liable for the duplicate charges. The blame, instead, rested with Visa for the way it handled a migration of merchant categories for cryptocurrencies, Coinbase said. While you can read my post yesterday for an in-depth description of what happened, the basic gist is that Visa refunded and recharged (under a different merchant category) a month of old transactions. Many users saw the recharge come through before the refund processed, making it look like they were double charged. Honestly, the issue was likely exacerbated by existing payment rails — it’s normal for refunds to take multiple days to show up on credit and debit statements. But here’s where it gets weird — this morning Visa issued a statement to some publications shifting the blam...

Here’s how to keep track of Elon Musk’s Roadster and Starman in space

Elon Musk’s Starman, the mannequin driver of the Tesla Roadster SpaceX launched aboard its Falcon Heavy rocket, is taking a trip around our solar system, in a large elliptical orbit that will bring him relatively close to Mars, the Sun and other heavenly bodies. But how to track the trip, now that the Roadster’s onboard batteries are out of juice and no longer transmitting live footage? Thanks to the work of Ben Pearson, a SpaceX fan and electrical engineer working in the aerospace industry, who created ‘Where is Roadster,’ a website that makes use of JPL Horizons data to track the progress of the Roadster and Starman through space, and to predict its path and let you know when it’ll come close to meeting up with various planets and the Sun. The website tells you the Roadster’s current position, too, as well as its speed and whether it’s moving towards or away from Earth and Mars at any given moment. It’s not officially affiliated with SpaceX or Tesla, but it is something Elon...

Engineering against all odds, or how NYC’s subway will get wireless in the tunnels

Never ask a wireless engineer working on the NYC subway system “What can go wrong?” Flooding, ice, brake dust, and power outages relentlessly attack the network components. Rats — many, many rats — can eat power and fiber optic cables and bring down the whole system. Humans are no different, as their curiosity or malice strikes a blow against wireless hardware (literally and metaphorically). Serverless software deployment to the cloud, this is not. New York City officially got wireless service in every underground subway station a little more than a year ago, and I was curious what work went into the buildout of this system as well as how it will expand in the future. That curiosity is part of a series of articles I’ve written on an observed pattern known as cost disease, the massively inflating costs of basic human services like health care, housing, infrastructure, and education. The United States spends trillions of dollars on each of these fields, massively outspending sim...

Exciting Technology

Search This Blog