“Masquerade”

Before taking a 15-104 course at Carnegie Mellon University as a first year student, I knew about one interactive and computational project – “Masquerade”, or better known online as MSQRD. MSQRD was once one of the most famous and most demandable mobile apps, it served as a foundation for
many face filters that people so often use while being on FaceTime or while taking a selfie or video. This app was fully developed by a Belarusian company Masquerade Technologies. My family is from Belarus, I myself was born and raised in that small but beautiful country and to think that such technology as face filters was developed there is simply astonishing since not everyone even knows about the existence of Belarus. What I admire about this project is the creators – Belarus has a very complicated and expensive educational system, many people can’t pay for it and/or can’t keep up with academics thus the country has a lot of people working in the physical labor force rather than in the offices. However, the creators of MSQRD were ambitious young men who wanted to get a better life. In the year of 2015, the company participated in “Garage48 Minsk Hackathon” and it took only a bit over 48 hours to develop MSQRD for iOS! Key creators of this project were Sergey Gonchar, Eugene Zatepyakin and Eugene Nevgen; as of January 2016, the team consisted of 11 members in total. Even though the team was rather small, it did not stop it from taking over the App Store – in February of 2016 it became the 9th most popular app and in March of the same year it made a purchasing deal with Facebook.

This project of face filters included both artificial intelligence and computer vision which pointed to many opportunities and futures since it added to various technologies, for example FaceID on iPhones that was introduced in 2017 as it helped to recognize a person’s face. MSQRD is a great app – it inspires people to create, to develop, to code no matter what your background is or where you are from: coding is available for everyone!