Zuckerberg channels Iron Man to tell us Facebook has bought face-swapping tech
Get ready for a lot of face-swapping in Facebook videos, folks.
On Wednesday, Facebook acquired Masquerade (also known as MSQRD), a mobile app that lets you add live face effects to videos or swap your face with, well, another face.
You May Also Like
Mark Zuckerberg announced the update by posting a video with a face filter -- an animated Iron Man mask (below).
"No, I haven't also built an Iron Man suit. I'm using this app Masquerade, that lets you put real time filters on your videos. And today I'm excited to share that the team behind Masquerade is joining Facebook," said Zuckerberg.
The Iron Man mask is cool, Zuck, but we really, really want to see you do a face swap.
"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 CEO Eugene Nevgen wrote in a blog post. According to him, the MSQRD app will stay "up and running," and users can expect the team to "keep adding fun features."
We don't know when Facebook plans to integrate some of MSQRD's features into its own apps, or if face-swapping is coming at all, but we wouldn't be surprised to see it soon.
The acquisition comes less than a month after Snapchat added a face-swapping option, and the app's face filters are a stuff of legend. And while face-swapping craziness suits the quirky Snapchat a little bit better than Facebook, it's obvious that team Zuckerberg doesn't want to get left behind on this one.
Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.
Topics Facebook Social Media
Stan is a Senior Editor at Mashable, where he has worked since 2007. He's got more battery-powered gadgets and band t-shirts than you. He writes about the next groundbreaking thing. Typically, this is a phone, a coin, or a car. His ultimate goal is to know something about everything.
