Tired of all your selfies being of humans?
Often wondered what those dog ears facial filters would look like on an actual dog?
Have you been desperately trying to get Snapchat or Instagram to recognise your pooches features but to no avail?
Well lament no more because a couple of Kiwi innovators have come up with a solution to the problem you never knew you had: a Snapchat-style app complete with facial filters exclusively for the use of your dog.
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Developed alongside Pedigree's Selfiestix, an attachment that clips dog treats to your phone to entice your pooch to pose for a selfie, the app has a raft of filters that all attach to your dog's face, turning your pooch into, among other things, a scholarly university student, a police dog or an intrepid explorer.
The app was developed by David Arcus and Maria Devereux for Colenso BBDO, a creative agency based in Auckland.
They felt that dogs were missing out on the fun of selfies and in particular filters.
"We felt like we wanted to give dogs the same tools humans have so when you're taking a selfie a human can generally add a filter to their image, we wanted the dogs to have the same cool tech."
So how does it work?
The developers took thousands of images of dogs and fed them into a 'machine learning algorithm.' Over time the algorithm learns what all of those different furry faces look like until the app can read any canine face it has thrown at it.
"A big challenge for us was that dogs come in all different shapes and sizes and many different faces from little pugs through to long nosed dogs so a big challenge for us was to make sure that they could all be recognised" says Mr Arcus.
It took the developers around 7000 different dogs before the app was useable.
The most difficult part of the tech is still convincing the pooch to look at the camera. As Newshub found out when we tested the app on Kanye, The Edge radio host, Dom Harvey's Sydney Silky pup.
Check out the video above to see the app in action.
Newshub.
