But behind every filter is a person dragging lines and changing shapes on a computer screen to achieve the desired look. Beauty can be subjective, and yet society continues to promote strict and unattainable ideals that, for women and girls, are disproportionately white, slim, and feminine.
Instagram publishes very little data on filters, especially beauty filters. In September 2020, Meta announced that more than 600 million people had tried at least one of its AR features. The metaverse is a much bigger concept than Meta and other companies that invest in AR and VR products. Snap and TikTok capture a large number of filter users, though Snap is also investing in place-based AR. Meta’s product suite includes Oculus headsets and Ray-Ban smart glasses, but focuses on what made Facebook popular: the face.
Beauty filters, especially those that dramatically alter the shape of a face and its features, are particularly popular and controversial. Instagram banned these so-called warping effects from October 2019 to August 2020 due to concerns about their impact on mental health. The policy has since been updated to ban only filters that encourage plastic surgery. The policy states that “content must not promote the use or represent the sale of a potentially dangerous cosmetic procedure, according to the Facebook Community Standards. This includes effects that represent such procedures across lines of surgery.” According to an MIT Technology Review statement in April 2021, this policy is enforced using “a combination of human and automated systems to review effects as they are submitted for publication.” The creators told me, however, that warp filters are often flagged inconsistently, and it’s unclear what exactly encourages the use of facelift.
“It became sensational”
Although many people use beauty filters simply for fun and entertainment, those puppy ears are actually quite a technical feat. First, they require face detection, in which an algorithm interprets the different shades of pixels captured by a camera to identify a face and its characteristics. A digital mask of a standard face is then applied to the image of the real face and adjusted to its shape, aligning the virtual jawline and nose of the mask with that of the person. In that skin, the graphics developed by encoders create the effects that you see on the screen. Machine vision technology in recent years has allowed this to happen in real time and on the move.
Spark AR is Instagram’s software development kit, or SDK, and it enables creators of augmented reality effects to more easily create and share the face filters that cover the Instagram feed. It is in this deep rabbit hole of filter demo videos on YouTube that I first met Florencia Solari, a creative AR technologist and well-known filter maker on Instagram. She showed me how to make a face filter that promised to plump and enhance my cheeks and plump my lips for that Kardashian-esque surgically enhanced face shape.
“Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.”
“I have this inflate tool that I’m going to apply with symmetry,” Solari said, “because whatever modification I make to this face, I want it to be symmetrical.” I tried to keep up by dragging the outline of my digital mannequin’s cheekbone up and out with my cursor. Next, I right-clicked on his lower lip map and selected “Increase” several times, playing God. Soon, with Solari as my guide, I had a filter that, while sloppy and simple, could be uploaded to Instagram and unleashed on the world.
SOLARI FLORENCE
Solari is part of a new class of AR and VR creators who have made a career out of mastering this technology. She started coding when she was around nine years old and was drawn to the creativity of developing the virtual world. In the beginning, making hers her own filters on Instagram was a hobby. But in 2020, Solari left a full-time job as an AR developer at Ulta Beauty to pursue online AR full-time as a freelance consultant. She recently worked with Meta and several other big brands (which she says she can’t disclose) to create branded AR web experiences, including filters.
Solari’s first filter, called “vedette++,” went viral in September 2019. “I tried to make an interpretation of what the superstar of the future would look like,” says Solari. The filter applies an iridescent, slightly greenish shimmer to the skin, which is smoothed across the surface and puffed out under each eye to the point that it looks as if half a clementine has been stuffed into each cheek. The lips double in size and the shape of the face adjusts so that a distinctive jaw line tapers to a small chin. “She was kind of an alien mix, but with a face that looked like it was covered in Botox,” says Solari. “It really became, like, sensational.”
Source: www.technologyreview.com