Neural networking is a branch of cloud computing that seems like magic to those without an intimate knowledge of it, and FaceApp, with its sometimes zany and sometimes disturbingly accurate face alterations, doesn’t help in dispelling that perception. Through the power of neural networking, the app applies its knowledge about how faces work to achieve a number of effects. You can take a selfie, or feed the app a photo you already have of yourself, a loved one, a celebrity, or even a face in a videogame or cartoon. Once it has a picture, it can add a smile, gender-flip it, make it older or younger, or attempt to touch it up to make the subject look more attractive.
The app is quite fun to play around with, but taken as a show of how far neural networking has come, it’s pretty amazing. As long as a clear picture is taken, gender flips look convincing, added smiles look real, older and younger portraits look pretty accurate, and photos of people who are already around 7 out of 10 or higher on the hot scale are mostly left alone by the hot filter. Even in bad lighting or with a poor angle, the app does a pretty good job in working with what you give it. Once images are created using the app you’ll have the option to simply save them or you can share them with others through your favorite social apps or text messaging. With the collage option you also have the ability to enable a 2 by 2 image grid or switch it to 2 by 1.
The free app is available for all in the Play Store right now. Even if you’ve never personally wondered what you may look like as another gender or what you’ll look like when you get older, giving the app a try certainly can’t hurt. There are curiosity and novelty apps that you try out a few times and delete, then there are apps that may stay on your device and be experimented with for a while. Thanks to constant improvements in neural networking and a large pool of possible subjects provided by the ability to import photos, this app could very well fall into the latter category for a number of users.
