In a recent announcement, social media giant Facebook let the world know that it was serious about taking on Snapchat’s challenge of providing photo filters & enhancements by buying Masquerade. The latter’s MSQRD mobile app lets you record video selfie animations, change the way you look, use celebrity masks, ‘face swap’ which lets people trade faces with one another & what’s perhaps more important for Facebook, the company has developed face tracking & face placement/rendering tech, which means that this technology should be easily incorporated into Facebook’s offerings.
Beyond its iPhone & Android apps, Masquerade has been offering its ‘Masquerade Face Tracking & 3D Effects Rendering SDK’, with which you can integrate real time video filters into iOS, Android, Windows & OS X apps, thus providing the ability to video chat with a mask. As a complementary product, the company also produces a tool called ‘Masquerade Editor’ that promises to simplify the creative process involved in creating masks in real-time. The saved filters can be used with the company’s mobile apps or put in a shared ‘Filters Store’, which serves an open directory for sharing trending filters from designers around the world.
We’ll have to wait & see what Facebook will actually do with the startup now that it has bought it, but for now it has promised to keep the app running & later incorporate the tech into Facebook’s main social network. Of late, analysts have been commenting on Facebook’s inability of keeping up with its competitors, especially Snapchat, amongst younger social app users. Snapchat has famously added capabilities to its silly photo filter offering with things like last year’s animated rainbow vomit with bulging eyes. There were reports in 2013 that Facebook had tried to take over Snapchat for US $3bn, which had been rejected by the instant messaging firm.
This acquisition has been interpreted by many as an effort by Facebook to seriously compete in the younger demographic by giving CEO Mark Zuckerberg & his Menlo Park, California-based company the wherewithal to take up the challenge. In fact, Zuckerberg celebrated the buying of Masquerade by posting on Facebook with an Iron Man mask. The tech concentrates more on video than photo masking, which continues the trend of Facebook playing hardball in this space in which they’re also taking on heavyweights like YouTube.
Image Credit: Masquerade
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