FaceDance Challenge: Using face as a joystick

About the client

DiffCat is an app development company based in Vietnam. They develop applications for Android, iOS and web services with the main goal of bringing fun, connection and motivation into games.

Business challenge

DiffCat wanted to create the first game that would use the smartphone front camera to play. Players would gain points by mimicking the emojis shown on the screen.

To develop their application, DiffCat needed software that could track players’ faces and facial expressions.

Solution

After a thorough research, DiffCat chose visage|SDK for several reasons:

• visage|SDK is very lightweight and fast, which is cruical for mobile games.
• FaceTrack tracks human faces and 75 facial landmarks in real time.
• visage|SDK comes with a detailed development guide and lots of customization options, which makes it easy to work with.
• FaceAnalysis accurately estimates emotions for detected faces.

FaceTrack and FaceAnalysis were used to detect players’ faces and emotions in real time and compare them to emojis shown on the screen.

The game works on a simple principle: users have to mimic different emojis that are popping up on the screen. For example, if the app shows an emoji with a closed eye and open mouth, players have to replicate the exact same face to score points.The better a player mimics the emoticons, the higher score they receive. Players can also record and share their videos on social networks.

Results

FaceDance Challenge! went viral in only one week. It has been featured in media worldwide such as The Huffington Post and Buzzfeed. The application has more than 10mil downloads to date.