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Lightricks has created Memoji from Facetune to blend cartoon-like emojis with an image of your face so you can turn your own selfies into emojis.
Memoji uses artificial intelligence and cutting edge image-processing technology to naturally reshape and animate any image to reflect a specific feeling or emotion.
Jerusalem, Israel-based Lightricks made the selfie-editing app Facetune 2.0, which lets you make glamorous selfies.
“Emojis have become a part of everyday conversation and guide the way we chat and share our emotions, but the overall reach and impact of this important technology is limited,” said Nir Pochter, chief marketing officer of Lightricks, in a statement. “As emoji connoisseurs, we knew that the next level of societal emojification was letting it guide the photo editing process from the very start. People want more than to just send emojis, they want to be emojis. While the world is busy applying AI to silly ventures like autonomous vehicles and data analysis, we’re taking it to where the need is greatest – making us more sophisticated emotional beings — emojis.”
Above: Memoji with Facetune turns your selfie into an emoji.
Memoji will give users the ability to instantly morph any selfie to reflect the emotion in a selected emoji. If someone wants to truly express how shocked they are, or how funny they found something, the image can be instantly adjusted and animated to reflect the proper emotion.
Additional features include the ability to instantly turn an individual into a unicorn. Lightricks’ unique formula of easy functionality and powerful editing capabilities have driven Facetune’s rise in a highly competitive mobile photo editing market.
“I don’t smile in pictures,” said Zeev Farbman, CEO of Lightricks, in a statement. “So when my girlfriend showed me a picture of me smiling in a photo we took on a hike, I was dumbfounded and scared. I’d spent years cultivating an image of Spartan focus and strength and this one photo threatened to ruin decades of consistency. Thankfully, we had already developed Memoji from Facetune and I was able to instantly click on the frowny face emoji to bring order and decency back into my life.”
Users can send their edited selfies as a GIF, video, or image. Memoji from Facetune is available for iOS and can be downloaded for free on the App Store.
Lightricks is an Israeli startup founded by five entrepreneurs with a track record in both academia and industry, four of whom hail from backgrounds as computer science PhD students.
In August 2015, after being self-funded for two years, Lightricks raised $10 million in its first external funding round, led by Carmel Ventures. Lightricks continues to deploy state-of-the-art technology to create the next generation of creativity tools for the mobile era.
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