VentureBeat

You never know where a Stanford doctorate in electrical engineering can take you. For Parham Aarabi it has led to the the hair-style simulation web site HairMixer.com.

Aarabi’s company, Modiface, has created the HairMixer site that lets people try out celebrity hair styles on their own faces. It was his decade of research in computer vision and image processing that powered this application.

I used this application, as you can tell from the photo. It’s a site where you submit your own photo and within seconds can see how you would look with a celebrity’s hair-do. In this case, I tried out Jessica Simpson. About 15 million people are trying it out every month and mailing the results to their friends. And about 200,000 people have signed up for a version of HairMixer on Facebook since it launched in December.

“It’s been a very surprising direction,” said Aarabi, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Toronto. “I started it on a sabbatical. The growth has been surprising.”

After spending all that time researching algorithms that could lead to automatic face detection and analysis, Aarabi started Toronto-based Modiface with Alireza Rabi in 2006. Since then, the nine-person company has created a bunch of web applications that morph facial features. And it has partnered with a variety of companies that are using it to amuse and educate millions of consumers on the Internet.

Modiface has teamed up with pharmaceutical giant Allergan to create an application that can simulate the effect of Botox on an aging person’s face. Modiface also powers the plastic surgery simulator at LiftMagic and Medicis’s Restylane facial makeover site. HairMixer.com launched in August, 2007. Other sites such as TheHairStyler.com allow you to do makeovers, but they often require manual procedures and don’t compute the results instantaneously.

There’s also Photochop (see our coverage), now called Zeroflaws, which lets you change any part of your body, such as an instant belly tuck.

“We do face visualization,” Aarabi said. “We can show what someone would look like with plastic surgery, a different hair style, and Botox. We can take away age on a face within seconds with our tool.”
All of Modiface’s partner sites combined are getting about 25 million visitors a month. The HairMixer.com site does more than 500,000 hair-style visualizations a day, with about 85 percent of them done by women over 25. The company generates revenue from ads on the sites but the partnerships are the main source of revenue. Now it’s a big business for Aarabi that is funding itself. So much so that he doesn’t feel a need to raise any capital. He says the company has a wide variety of patents on the technology.