Cartoon of the Week: Blippar turns your face into a digital billboard

This week Blippar launched Halos, a social app built on facial recognition tech. This new feature allows users to scan their faces into the app and then customize various bubbles around their noggins.

The bubbles indicate users’ current moods via emojis, photos, recent Tweets, YouTube videos and even Spotify songs.

This is how we’ll say goodbye to privacy and mystery when meeting new people. Why make an effort to hold a conversation when you can scan a person’s face and figure out everything about him or her?

Here is how to reveal your identity and become an open book: scan your face with the app, and it will save your picture on its servers. You can then enter your preferences, such as your favorite music and your current mood, so anyone who wants to ‘blipp’ you in the future can see a ring of expressive icons pop up around your face in augmented reality (AR).

In other words, you’ll be hanging out with a digital billboard of yourself to promote your personal tidbits. All I can think of is how advertisers will enhance this for promotional purposes.

Ambarish Mitra, co-founder and CEO at Blippar, said, ‘Our faces are our most unique and expressive form of communication.

‘Through Halos, our 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 interesting part of this is that banks can use the technology for authentication purposes, and it can even be used during conferences and events so attendees can scan each other’s faces and find out who they are, what they do and so on.

Blippar has an even bigger, more exciting goal to build an AR wikipedia. Mitra says he wants Blippar to build a complete ‘visual browser’ to identify anything you point your phone at.

Can Blippar compete with rivals like Shazam for food, Samsung’s Bixby Vision on the new Galaxy or Apple’s ARKit?

Stay tuned for more fun cartoons!

Follow eXo Platform’s board Cartoon of the Week on Pinterest.

Brahim Jaouane

I am a Digital Marketing specialist specialized in SEO at eXo Platform. Passionate about new technologies and Digital Marketing. With 10 years' experience, I support companies in their digital communication strategies and implement the tools necessary for their success. My approach combines the use of different traffic acquisition levers and an optimization of the user experience to convert visitors into customers. After various digital experiences in communication agencies as well as in B2B company, I have a wide range of skills and I am able to manage the digital marketing strategy of small and medium-sized companies.