When Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and owner of Facebook, published a funny video with an effect masking his face from IronMan, he also announced the acquisition of a really nice app called Masquerade, which allows you to transform your face taken from the real-time smartphone camera, to take photos or record videos with special disguise effects. In addition to IronMan, the application also provides several other masks such as that of a monkey, that of a tiger, a dog or a woman, an old man, a guy with a mustache, a woman with glasses, Di Caprio who wins the Oscar and several others. Facebook-owned Masquerade uses AR (Augmented Reality) effects and allows you to take funny selfie photos or record videos with your digitally transformed face automatically, very realistic and fun.
The application works so that you just have to frame yourself to take a picture and choose the type of face you want to use. The design overlaps and adapts to the face in order to look as realistic as possible, to look like another person.
The Masquerade or MSQRD app, which will probably be integrated into Facebook or Facebook Messenger in the future, can now be installed free of charge for Android smartphones and iPhones, with a limited number of faces to transform into. To take the picture it is important only to let your face enter the perimeter drawn on the screen and stay in a bright environment. The photos and videos created can then be shared on Facebook as Zuckemberg did in his demonstration that we can see below.
The Masquerade application, very nice, is not a novelty of the kind.
In the past we have also seen websites to do virtual face transformations and animations and to animate your face in a movie.
Masquerade also wants to be Facebook's answer to the extraordinary features of Snapchat, the app that most of all focuses on face transformations in real time. By installing Snapchat on Android or iPhone and registering an account, even without adding friends or participating in social network activities, you can use its special camera to capture selfies masked with AR (augmented reality) effects, which appear in real time on the screen. In Snapchat, you can then activate the camera and then press the button with the sketch next to the shutter button to enter the gallery of transformation effects and see them in real time. Some of them are also interactive, with animations that appear only when the face moves in a certain way, for example by opening the mouth or giving a kiss.
