Need New Look? Online Makeover is fan-taaz-tic

March 18, 2008 Need New Look? Online Makeover is fan-taaz-tic

Thanks to a Jacobs School startup company whose site, Taaz.com went live today, the cosmetics counter isn't the only place to try out the latest makeup trends. The new way is easier, faster, and much more private. Anyone with a digital photograph can now apply more than 4,000 makeup products with the click of a mouse. It's all at www.taaz.com - the creation of two Jacobs School computer scientists turned entrepreneurs.

The computer scientists invented an algorithm for separating gloss from non-gloss in digital images - a technical feat crucial for taaz.com's patented approach to applying photorealistic makeup to images. It is also useful for more traditional computer vision applications like face recognition.

Taaz.com is easy and free. Simply upload a portrait-style photograph and a computer vision system automatically identifies your eyes, nose, lips and cheeks. From here, you can apply thousands of makeup products from a wide range of brands to your digital portrait and experiment with new hairstyles and colored contacts. After trying a taaz.com prototype, one user went home and bought a new pair of colored contacts, says David Kriegman, a UCSD computer science professor and taaz.com co-founder.

Once you create a new look, you can share it with friends, post the picture in taaz.com's public gallery or upload it to social networking sites. To make shopping easier, you can print a list of what you tried on at taaz.com.

"With taaz.com, we take something very complicated -- giving digital portraits a photorealistic makeover -- and make it very easy," says Satya Mallick, a taaz.com co-founder with a fresh Ph.D. in electrical engineering from UCSD.

Mallick's dissertation focused on the gloss removal algorithm that led to taaz.com.

Kriegman, Mallick and third co-founder Kevin Barnes secured venture funding from iSherpa Capital in August 2007. They hired three recent UCSD grads. Kriegman credits the Jacobs School's von Liebig Center, UCSD's Technology Transfer and Intellectual Property Services, and CONNECT's Springboard program for helping the team develop and spin out their business, license the core technology, and secure venture capital.

Watch a two-minute demo of Taaz.com here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGE2zGQypbA

Source: University of California, San Diego

Rate this story - 3.3 /5 (10 votes)

rank
1
2
3
4
5

view popular

Other News

Government delays new ban on Internet gambling

Technology / Internet

11 hours ago | 3 / 5 (2) | 0

(AP) -- The Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve are giving U.S. financial institutions an additional six months to comply with regulations designed to ban Internet gambling.

Fujitsu Develops Technology for Low-Temperature Full-Service Direct Formation of Graphene Transistors on Large-Scale Sub

Technology / Semiconductors

11 hours ago | 5 / 5 (5) | 1

Fujitsu Laboratories today announced, as a world first, the development of a novel technology for forming graphene transistors directly on the entire surface of large-scale insulating substrates at low temperatures ...

Teachers begin using cell phones for class lessons

Technology / Hi Tech

8 hours ago | 3 / 5 (1) | 0

(AP) -- Ariana Leonard's high school students shuffled in their seats, eagerly awaiting a cue from their Spanish teacher that the assignment would begin. "Take out your cell phones," she said in Spanish.

Semantic research sets world standards

Technology / Computer Sciences

18 hours ago | 3.3 / 5 (3) | 1

(PhysOrg.com) -- European researchers have created new tools for semantic technology development which are helping to set the next generation of official standards. The tools also unblock some key bottlenecks ...

Signal fading on radio traffic reports

Technology / Other

10 hours ago | not rated yet | 1

(AP) -- For more than 20 years, Mike Nolan was known to radio listeners as the "eye in the sky." He flew over Southern California freeways in his single-engine plane, reporting on the nation's worst traffic.