"Let's face it." -- Apple executives, apparently.
Apple has reportedly acquired a motion capture startup that specializes in translating human faces onto digital avatars, according to reports.
The company is called Faceshift and it's based in Zurich. It's best known for having worked on the upcoming "Star Wars" film, helping to bring the galaxy's aliens to life.
Faceshift uses motion capture technology that can take real faces and translate them into life-like digital models. The technology has been used in a variety of movies, as well as videos games like L.A. Noire.
An Apple spokesperson confirmed the acquisition to TechCrunch. Financials of the deal were not made public.
Faceshift's website says that it can "capture realistic and emotional facial expressions" that are then demonstrated digitally. This can mean your smile in real life could quickly become the smile of an ogre, as the company's website demonstrated.
This kind of technology is becoming increasingly popular in the tech community. Snapchat bought Looksery in the fall of 2015, a company that had created a face modification app that launched on Kickstarter. Those features have now been integrated into Snapchat's animated selfie "lenses."
