Modiface Inc., the sister company of L’Oréal that has been in operation for almost 12 years now, is gearing up to shake things up in the nail care arena. It recently launched an all-new app that they are calling Virtual Nail Salon. This app gives consumers an enhanced AR experience by applying different shades and textures of nail polish to live videos of distinct hands.
The founder and CEO of Modiface, Parham Aarabi shared about this new launch saying, “We have been working on this for about two years, and we felt the technology had improved enough and was finally in a place where nail AR could be a reality.” He also compared the Virtual Nail Salon to Modiface Hair Color and Modiface Virtual Makeover that are prior apps of the company and found them to be along the similar lines. These apps enable users to try on different hair and makeup experiences in real-time to see real changes to how they look. Modiface analyzed 10,000 hand images to understand and identify different hand positions and motions.
The Virtual Nail Salon app is one of its kind and showcases the beauty AR company’s new nail and hand tracking technology. This technology comes from a deep learning model which, as mentioned above, was tested on more than 10,000 annotated hand images. The app has been developed using the Core ML of Apple. Modiface was also questioned whether it would stick to L’Oréal-branded products or the other agnostic products in the market. To this, the CEO shared, “The primary focal points are to innovate on beauty augmented reality and artificial intelligence, deploy these technologies at scale across L’Oréal brand websites and applications, and to provide these technologies to select retail and technology partners.”
This app is not necessarily targeting nail salons but users who are on the lookout for their next favorite color. This app can most definitely be called the perfect amalgamation of beauty and Augmented Reality. What’s left to be seen is whether the Virtual Nail Salon app will garner as much popularity as the predecessors.
