Ever since the movie Face/Off starring Nicholas Cage and John Travolta, the thought of becoming someone else (even if only for a day) has infused a mesmerizing appeal, at least for some people. Even though the medical aspect of it is a welcome treatment for victims of facial trauma, the digital version of becoming someone else in real life has always been quite creepy. You can expect things to get even more freaky when you see what the Face Stealer app is capable of doing.
I have always wondered what anyone’s intent could possibly be other than malicious when they go completely anonymous on the Internet. I am not talking about hiding your IP address or even encoding your emails, that can many times be understandable in this hacker happy society we live in. But when it comes to masking your face to the extent that you are completely unrecognizable, things get pushed to the deep end of the pool, don’t you think?
The Face Stealer AI app is a project maintained by Yahoo Japan, and it is expected to be rolled out and included into a chat application that Yahoo Japan intends to make. The Face Stealer app tracks several facial points in order to super impose masks which you can create yourself or pick from the default library. We have seen various implementations of this technology before, but this is by far the best execution we have seen to date. Even though it is creepy, and it’s even creepier that the default masks are from dogs, there’s no doubt this technology could create a lot of hype.
With the Face Stealer, you can simply superimpose any mask on your face and then share the result via Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. The Face Stealer is of course an app which could infuse a lot of fun into your everyday life. However, when you look at the more creepy aspects of the implementation, you’ll quickly see that there are a lot of negative side effects that come with a feature like this. Hiding your face when talking to someone live is not only creepy, it’s also deceiving in the very context of the word. The question is whether or not it would be useful enough to outweigh those negative aspects. What would you use it for?
Yahoo Japan’s Face Stealer Chat Feature
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