It’s not just that Apple is engaged in augmented reality technologies – now they have already reached such a level that they allow you to turn a photo into a video by animating a photo right on an iPhone. While these apps don’t always work the way you want them to, some developers get bogged down: for example, the creators of the expression camera app, who have combined AR and machine learning technologies. The application allows you to control facial expressions in photos or even a video, substituting the facial expressions of your face.
How to animate photos on iPhone
The program belongs to Japanese startup EmbodyMe and uses neural networks to digitize your facial features, facial expressions, and gestures and superimpose them in real-time on any image or video of your choice.
The application is very easy to use. Download it and then you can choose from one of the pre-made images or videos, or use the celebrity search or choose a photo from your own gallery on your iPhone. For example, you can find a photo of Tim Cook and try to animate it.
Once you select a photo, the app uses TrueDepth sensors, which are commonly used by iPhones for Face ID, to scan your face and change the facial expressions of the person in the photo in real-time. I tried to take a photo of Donald Trump as an example – the result was not quite what I expected. The expression on his face did change, but as soon as his mouth was opened, everything broke.
But with the photos of Tim Cook, the head of Apple, and rapper The Weeknd, everything worked out – the application very coolly recognized facial expressions and framed it in the photo. Moreover, the result obtained can be recorded using a round button, and turn a photo into a video on an iPhone.
Of course, while the application is clearly incomplete. In some cases, it is really good at recognizing facial expressions and substituting them in the photo, but a lot depends on the picture itself. And the algorithm doesn’t always work right. With video, everything is really bad: for me, you can use expression camera for photos, but the application is not yet ready to work with video.
In general, this does not interfere with playing with the application and recording a cool video for friends or relatives or playing a prank on someone in our chat. This is a young startup, and the project is still developing, it will be interesting to see what happens in the end. As long as the application is not commercially available, all of its features are available for free.
