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Looksery Changes Your Face In Real Time For Flattering Video Selfies

My eyes are brown. My face is round. But I don't have to show you that. Looksery can give me beautiful baby blues and a chiseled jaw with just a few taps.

The iOS (and soon, Android) app creates a basic 3D depth map of your face using nothing more than your smartphone's front-facing camera, then allows you to change that face in real-time. And we're not just talking giant cartoony changes, either: when I swapped my eye color and made my face slimmer, the difference was strikingly realistic, even as I turned my head. Want to look like you've lost 10 pounds? It's as easy as applying a filter in Instagram.

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Of course, there are wilder combinations than that. You can also look like a flaming skull, a cat, a lizard which bears a striking resemblance to Rango, or perhaps this demon which threatened to suck out my soul the moment I opened my mouth.

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Looksery is a fairly tiny company that just got Kickstarted this summer, and right now all you can do with your new and improved face is send video messages to friends. But when I spoke to founder and CEO Victor Shaburov at a Silicon Valley Virtual Reality meetup, he says the applications extend way farther than that. First and most obvious, the company plans to add real-time video chat next year.

But Looksery says it's also hoping to sign deals with call centers, mobile carriers, and cosmetics companies to license the tech. Shaburov says that some people don't take kindly to customer support calls outsourced to India or Bangladesh, but he suggests the technology could make poor call center employees look like beautiful women. Which sounds pretty damn culturally insensitive, but those are the kinds of requests the company says it's dealing with. Cosmetics companies, meanwhile, could obviously let you "try on" contact lenses, wigs, and makeup.

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I like the way my face looks now, thank you very much. But if you're feeling a little insecure (or just playful!) you can check out the app for yourself. [iTunes App Store]