Faceshift

Faceshift
Information
Industry	Facial motion capture software
Founded	2012
Founder	Thibaut Weise, Brian Amberg, Sofien Bouaziz, Mark Pauly
Headquarters	Zurich, Switzerland
Notable Personnel	Thibaut Weise (CEO), Brian Amberg (CTO)
Products	faceshift Studio
Parent	Apple (from 2015)
Website	http://www.faceshift.com

Faceshift (stylized "faceshift"; registered as faceshift AG) was a Swiss software company that made markerless, real-time facial motion capture software. It was a spin-off of the Computer Graphics and Geometry Laboratory at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), founded in 2012 by Thibaut Weise, Brian Amberg, Sofien Bouaziz and Mark Pauly, and was based in Zurich. Its product, faceshift Studio, used a consumer depth camera such as the Microsoft Kinect, the Asus Xtion or later Intel RealSense to track a performer's face and drive a digital character's expressions live.

Apple acquired the company in 2015 and confirmed the purchase in November of that year without stating its plans. Co-founder Sofien Bouaziz then joined Apple, where, according to the Eurographics Association, he developed the real-time face tracking algorithm behind the iPhone X's Animoji, which Apple also made available to developers through ARKit.

Reviewed 15 October 2026. Checked every claim against the cited TechCrunch, EPFL, Eurographics, Venture Kick, Startupticker, CG Channel, fxguide and MacRumors pages, the Google Patents and Zefix records, and Crossref metadata for the three papers. About review dates.

History

Research origins

Faceshift's software grew out of real-time facial animation research at EPFL. Venture Kick, a Swiss startup funding programme, described the technology as developed at EPFL on the basis of research begun at ETH Zurich. At SIGGRAPH 2011, Weise, Bouaziz, Hao Li and Pauly presented a system that recorded a user with "a non-intrusive, commercially available 3D sensor" and combined geometry and texture registration with pre-recorded animation priors, so that "any user" could control a digital avatar's facial expressions in real time without face markers, special lighting or complex scanning hardware. In a 2015 article, fxguide traced Faceshift's core technology to two papers led by Weise, "Face/Off: Live Facial Puppetry" (2009) and "Realtime Performance-Based Facial Animation" (2011), and wrote that Li had worked with the team before it formed the company.

A follow-up paper by Bouaziz, Yangang Wang and Pauly at SIGGRAPH 2013 described real-time face tracking on commodity RGB-D sensors that needed "no user-specific training or calibration", jointly solving for a 3D expression model of the user and the tracking parameters. The related United States patent, "Online modeling for real-time facial animation" (US 9,378,576, inventors Bouaziz and Pauly), was filed on 7 June 2013 and granted on 28 June 2016. Its assignment record lists a transfer from EPFL to FaceShift AG and a later assignment from FaceShift GmbH to Apple. TechCrunch reported that EPFL had originally owned two of Faceshift's facial animation patents, which were transferred to the company in 2015. A later patent claiming priority to the same 2013 application, US 11,948,238, was granted to Apple on 2 April 2024.

Startup years (2012-2015)

In July 2012 Faceshift, then led by Weise as CEO and Amberg as CTO, reached the final stage of the Venture Kick programme. Venture Kick wrote that four scientists had developed the application and that it was aimed at animation and video game studios, with possible uses in online role-playing games and communication over Facebook or Skype. Weise also took part in the Venture Leaders programme in the United States in 2012.

EPFL announced the commercial launch of the software on 19 November 2012. At that point the start-up was based at the Technopark in Zurich, and the software worked with a camera with motion and depth sensors similar to the Kinect or Asus Xtion. On first use, the software needed ten minutes to learn the user's face while the user performed requested expressions such as smiling and raising the eyebrows. EPFL listed video games, video chat and animated films as uses, and said the company also provided versions for the general public that were integrated into applications such as Skype or online games.

In February 2013 Faceshift won both the jury and audience awards at the AlpICT Venture Night of the Lift conference. On 16 May 2013 it was named one of two Venture Kick winners, receiving the programme's maximum support of 130,000 Swiss francs. Venture Kick reported that the company was already selling to animation studios in the games and film industries, and Weise said he planned to use the prize to expand in the United States. Faceshift later opened an office on the US West Coast headed by film and gaming industry veteran Doug Griffin and a London office headed by visual effects specialist Nico Scapel, according to TechCrunch.

Faceshift worked closely with Intel. At Intel's Computex 2014 keynote, Intel president Renee James spoke with Michelle Xu while an avatar of Xu answered; the demonstration ran on an ASUS laptop with Intel's RealSense 3D sensor, and Faceshift's software turned the depth and video data into facial expressions and eye-gaze information for the virtual character. TechCrunch later cited an Intel video showing the RealSense camera integrated with the Faceshift SDK.

By 2015 the company had 13 employees and ranked 13th in the TOP 100 Swiss Startup Award. Venture Kick listed its customers as studios in games, film, advertising and animation.

Acquisition by Apple

In August 2015 Weise, Amberg and Pauly left the company's board and were replaced by Martin H. Frey, a lawyer at Baker & McKenzie in Zurich. Startupticker.ch reported on 7 September 2015 that the change indicated a sale to a US company, that the Faceshift website suggested the software was no longer for sale, and that both Intel and Apple were possible buyers; MacRumors had reported on 4 September that Apple might have bought the company.

On 24 November 2015 Apple confirmed the acquisition to TechCrunch with its standard statement: "Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans." The price was not disclosed. TechCrunch reported that several Faceshift employees were working for Apple in Europe and that the company's technology had been used in "the latest Star Wars film to make non-human characters more human-like in their expressions". TechCrunch noted that Apple already had patents and assets in motion capture, facial recognition and augmented reality, partly from three earlier European acquisitions: PrimeSense, Polar Rose and Metaio.

The Swiss company, by then named faceshift GmbH, was dissolved by a shareholders' resolution of 31 May 2018 and, after liquidation, was deleted from the Zurich commercial register on 30 April 2020.

Products

Faceshift's main product was faceshift Studio; the company also released plugins for third-party animation software and a software development kit.

Release	Date	Notes
Initial release	November 2012	Commercial launch announced by EPFL on 19 November 2012; worked with Kinect-style or Asus Xtion depth cameras; ten minutes of training on first use
Faceshift 2014	June 2014	New calibration workflow with faster training, manual adjustment of eyelid and eye position, a "Neutralize" button, less jitter in tracking, timeline audio waveform and annotated frames; Windows and Mac OS X; Pro edition US$1,500 per year with live streaming into other 3D packages, Freelance edition US$800 per year without it, and a US$150 perpetual non-commercial licence
Unity plugin update	June 2014	Free Unity plugin updated to stream facial capture data into the engine in real time
faceshift Studio 2015	March 2015	Better raw performance and support for the Intel RealSense sensor, which captures at 60 fps; Windows and OS X, with a Linux version in development; US$1,500 per year per seat or a US$150 perpetual non-commercial licence

How it worked

In fxguide's 2015 test, Faceshift was calibrated once per camera and once per actor. Training took the performer through about 29 poses, such as eyebrows up and jaw left or right, to build a custom profile; during tracking, the software matched the performer's face to this trained model and passed blendshape values to a target character rig in real time. Its outputs included head pose, gaze direction, blendshape weights, marker positions, a custom avatar and recorded video and audio clips. fxguide's reviewer reported that it worked equally well with an Intel RealSense camera on a PC and a PrimeSense Carmine 1.09 on a Mac.

Faceshift could run as a standalone program or stream into Autodesk Maya, MotionBuilder and Unity, and could export animation in standard formats including BVH and FBX.

XR relevance

Faceshift's software let a user drive a 3D character with their own face using consumer depth cameras. The EPFL laboratory describes the technology as used for animation production and "as a novel communication metaphor in virtual worlds and social networks". When the acquisition became public, TechCrunch noted the growing market for virtual reality and Apple's existing assets in augmented reality, but Apple did not say how it would use the technology.

The Eurographics Association credits Bouaziz with developing, at Apple, the real-time face tracking algorithm behind iPhone X Animoji, which third-party developers can also use through ARKit.

See also

• Facial motion capture
• Face tracking
• Motion capture
• PrimeSense
• Metaio