vTag Add Your Face

Developed using artificial intelligence, our tool finds the virtual features closest to yours and adds them to your avatar. It does this by noting the position, shape, angle and size of things like your eyes, nose, and mouth in the photo and predicts which of our customisation options will match most closely with them. It also looks at things like your face shape, hair line, whether you have high or low cheekbones and if you’re wearing makeup to add more of the things that make you unique.

We trained our tool to recognise human features by feeding it a large number of images of real faces. Initially, the features in the photos were labelled with things like ‘arched eyebrows’, ‘rosy cheeks’ and ‘straight hair’ to help the programme learn what it was looking at. Pretty soon, the tool was intelligent enough to accurately recognise the correct labels for these images. When the tool got it wrong, we corrected it so it could get it right next time. We then trained it to match these labels to items in our customisation library so that the tool could pick out the features most like those in the photo. Now, the tool has learned enough to take your selfie, predict which of our customisation options matches most with your features, and create a unique avatar face based on those predictions.

So what do we do with your data after you take your selfie? Firstly, we upload your photo to our servers. This is because the tool does its calculations outside of the app. After looking at your photo and assessing your features, the tool then selects the customisation options most like yours and feeds them back to the app. The photo is then deleted from our servers. We don’t use your photo for anything else. To generate another face using the tool, you’d need to take another selfie.

Currently in early access, there’s plenty more we want to do with the tool. We’ll continue to train it to make it more intelligent but none of your photos will be used for that purpose. We’ll also be making new customisation options for our tool to select from. We want to hear your feedback on how closely we matched your face! To tell what you think, email feedback@vtime.net.