During an interview yesterday with The Wall Street Journal’s WSJDLive conference, Facebook’s chief product officer Chris Cox introduced a new app that allows users to apply artsy filters to their content. Sound familiar? It’s basically a carbon copy of Prisma, a similar app which lit up earlier this year after people discovered how fun it was to turn your selfies into Monet ripoffs. (The notable difference between the two apps is that Prisma filters are applied post-production, while Facebook’s app will work in real time.)
Facebook is calling the copycat a “style transfer” app, because it allows you to, well, transfer the styles of famous artists onto your pics and videos. (No word on an official name yet, though if they take a page from subsidiary Instagram’s let’s just copy the competition playbook, it’ll probably be something similar to “Prisma.”) Cox also did not give any information on when the filter app would be available or how it would be distributed on the platform. Earlier today, Mark Zuckerberg posted a demo of the feature on his own Facebook page using his dog, Beast, as a model. “Looking forward to getting this in your hands soon,” Zuck explained in the video’s caption.
Poor Beast. Has anybody ever asked him how he feels about constantly being turned into content? What say you, PETA?
