You've probably had the experience of posing awkwardly for a photo while everyone else looks great. Now, China's leading photo editing firm, Meitu has a solution that helps it resist the urge to destroy that photo.
The Meitu application of the same name, which claims more than 100 million monthly active users in August, recently launched a feature that users virtually rotate their faces up, down, left or right. There are already a lot of editing applications that allow people to polish their photos like a professional, but Meitu wants to take the retouching to another level.
"Traditional image processing technology can only perform planes stretching in two dimensions, and the image" has no depth information and, therefore, is unable to truly reflect changes in real-life posture ", says a company spokesperson.
The function, called" 3D Reshape ", takes suggestions of a static portrait and applies facial recognition and reconstruction technologies to generate 3D information of the user's face. simulates how the user's head tilts or rotates in real life, producing results that the firm claims are more "natural" and "realistic."
The process is a bit strange, but the result is Satisfactory / Credit: Meitu
The function also works for group photos, so users can choose to fix the unflattering stance of a particular person.The Chinese company is not the unique photo application that comes with 3D editing. Google Snapseed has a similar offer.
Meitu does everything possible to perfect the portraits by maintaining an internal research and development team of 200 employees. For the 3D project, the researchers collected 18 unique facial expressions from 1,200 people who were mainly Chinese and were between 12 and 60 years old.
Despite being a dominator in his space, Meitu has had to look beyond photo editing to get monetization since its inception. days. During the six months ended June 30, the firm generated 72 percent of its income from the sale of smartphones designed to take outstanding selfies, while Internet related services provided the rest of the money.
However, Meitu has seen its hardware revenue decrease. as smartphone shipments decline in China and the competition heats up. By contrast, Internet-based revenues increased 132 percent year-over-year thanks to the growth of advertising and "value-added" services. The latter means sales of virtual items in the Meitu Meipai video streaming application.
The treasure of Meitu users can have another practical use. In July, the firm disbursed $ 30 million for an undisclosed stake in Gengmei, a social networking platform that connects clients with plastic surgeons who offer them advice. It is not difficult to imagine a future where Meitu links its users who seek beauty not only with virtual tools but also with long-term and real life media.