Facebook acquires Masquerade app for face-swaps, live videos

PanARMENIAN.Net - Facebook has acquired Masquerade, a selfie app that lets you do face-swaps and record silly video animations of yourself and share them across social media, VentureBeat reports.

Available for Android and iOS, Masquerade is the latest selfie filter app to be snapped up by a bigger social network — back in September Snapchat bought Looksery to power its new Lenses feature.

In Masquerade’s case, the app will actually remain as a standalone offering, though its funky filters will also be making their way towards Facebook’s billion-plus hordes of users.

“Video communication is exploding,” explained Masquerade cofounder Eugene Nevgen in a blog post. “At Masquerade, we’ve worked hard to make video more fun and engaging by creating filters that enhance and alter your appearance. Now, we’re excited to join forces with Facebook and bring the technology to even more people. Within Facebook, we’re going to be able to reach people at a scale like never before. For starters, we’ll be able to bring our technology to Facebook’s audience of nearly 1.6 billion people. This is a scale of audience we never imagined was possible.”

Masquerade boasts of a “dream-team of leading experts in the fields of machine learning, face detection and tracking, facial expression recognition, 3D graphics and visual effects.”