Bringing Facial Recognition To The Mainstream

We are thrilled to announce the beta launch of Halos, Blippar’s Augmented Reality Face Profiles. This new in-app feature builds on our existing facial recognition technology and allows users to create and customize their own AR Face Profile, called a ‘Halo’. This latest launch makes facial recognition technology directly accessible for all smartphone users for the first time.

Halos give you the freedom to express your inner self to the world in a unique way. Choose to celebrate the things you love, let the world know how you’re feeling, share your tune of the moment, identify your celebrity lookalike and so much more. You are in complete control of your profile and can toggle from visible to invisible in an instant.

Halos are powered by our real-time facial recognition technology, which is one of the most accurate, lightweight and fast face recognition engines in the world. Our technology has more than 99.6% accuracy* and is based on single-model and single-patch method.

Last December, we launched Public Figure Facial Recognition -- initially allowing you to scan 70,000 famous faces with the Blippar app to learn interesting facts about them drawn from the Blipparsphere (our visual Knowledge Graph drawn from publicly accessible sources). The app can now recognize a whopping 370,00 public figures, the largest such repertoire in the world.

Our Facial Recognition technology is also available at request as an API for businesses wishing to license and integrate it into their own applications and/or products. The possible applications of this technology are vast and range from mobile banking to smart networking and building access control.

Ambarish Mitra, Co-Founder & CEO at Blippar, says: “Our faces are our most unique and expressive form of communication. Through AR Face Profiles we are making the face accessible in digital format for the first time, providing an innovative and dynamic way of expressing ourselves and discovering more about those around you. The technology lends itself to many other forms of implementation, and we are delighted to be able to share our APIs and technology with other companies, who like us, are committed to spurring on innovation in their own industries.”

Halos are a salute to our focus on augmented reality and computer vision technology.

We aim to change the way in which we interact with the world around us, helping you access more information more quickly and to connect with new experiences.

With more features to come, the beta launch of Halos includes the following:

• Mood - Let others know how you’re feeling with 3D animatable personalities

• Aura - Feeling stormy? Ready to boogie? Choose an aura filter that suits you best

• Video - Play your favourite YouTube Video

• Look-alike - Find out who your celebrity look-alike is

• Moment - Exhibit your photography skills from your own gallery

• Song - Show off your favourite new track from Spotify

• Tweet - Display latest Tweet from either your personal or favourite Twitter account

Feeling badass or flirty? Download the app to express yourself with Augmented Reality Face Profiles today and get your friends to blipp you!

For more information, read our official press release, and articles: TechCrunch, Fast Company, The Sun, The Daily Mail & The Drum

**This is the LFW face verification number, which stand for “Labeled Faces in the Wild”, a database of labeled face images intended for studying unconstrained face recognition and is commonly used to test/compare model accuracy.