The future of augmented reality is customization.
“Looking forward, the biggest trend when it comes to augmented reality is a combination of AR with artificial intelligence,” said Dr. Parham Aarabi, chief executive officer and founder of ModiFace. “[The mirror] isn’t just seeing a makeup product, [it’s] understanding who that person is — what their skin tone is, what their skin concerns are, what their face shape is [and] their hair color. Using all that information, you can have a much more realistic experience and can offer much more personalized recommendations.”
One brand tapping into this technology is Cover Girl.
The Coty-owned brand has a new app called Cover Girl Custom Blend that it powers using ModiFace technology. The Custom Blend app aims to provide customers with a foundation matched as accurately to their skin tone as possible. The company will blend up to three shades of Cover Girl foundation to create the right formula, and then ships it to the customer. The foundations are $25, a steeper price than a typical $8 Cover Girl item. “You can try on a foundation using augmented reality, and then have the perfect shade matched for you with artificial intelligence,” said Aarabi.
Aarabi noted that a burgeoning category that could benefit from this technology is skin care. “The question we asked ourselves was, ‘If you ask a dermatologist to look at skin in a photo, how would they analyze it?’ Our artificial intelligence system is getting fairly close,” said Aarabi. He noted that ModiFace research found that its skin analysis technology was 89 percent accurate in recognizing skin-concerns compared to a 92 percent rate for dermatologists.
