DO NOT USE - HP Lab University 2007: HP develops mobile beauty service

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HP has created an innovative system that blends the world of cosmetics and mobile technology which it hopes to pilot in the next six months if it can establish partnerships with global brands.

The computing giant was approached by one of its customers - a large consumer packaged goods (CPG) company, who wanted it to create something technically advantageous to help it better engage with its 80 per cent-majority female audience, Nina Bhatti, a researcher at HP's Labs told delegates at HP Lab University in Lisbon this morning.

The result is a colour-matching platform for mobile phone images, which makes use of the company's imaging and mobility expertise.

"We're talking about an unusual juxtaposition of things. You don't usually associate HP with cosmetics or the retail mobile experience but that's what we've built here," she said.

"[The customer in question had] done lots things before like in-store kiosks but that is very expensive. We wanted to do something mobile and futuristic and realised that our target group was teenage girls as that's often the first time they experiment with cosmetics. If you go to a very expensive department store there are women to assist you but they're often very domineering and might intimidate you into buying more products. Those women are just looking at your face but what if your phone could look at your face?"

Many women often buy the wrong shade of foundation because they try to assess their their skin tone based on the colour of their hands (often a darker shade than the face) or don't realise that the product may look different when it dries. This means that they usually find the experience a disappointing one and end up with a draw full of unwanted cosmetic items, according to Bhatti.

The idea behind HP's concept is for a woman to take a picture of herself - or get someone else to do so - whilst holding a colour chart (one provided by HP that would be obtained in store or as a magazine pull out) and then send it via MMS to HP's systems which analyse the sender's skin tone and send back a message with a suggested shade of foundation.

The technology detects which part of the photo is the woman's face by using an enhanced Viola and Jones method, a face mask template is applied and then pixels with luminance outside bounds are excluded.

"We wanted to take a cellphone and really view the device in a different way. Half the phones shipped are shipped with a camera. This is a networked camera that girls have in their handbag or pocket all the time," added Bhatti.

HP has thus far analysed the skin tones of 260 women as part of its exercise but now it wants to move the project forward into commercial reality.

"The current status is the system is now running as a networked live service in prototype and entails five product lines," Bhatti said.

"We plan on doing consumer testing on this as we want to know how women feel about it and we are looking for partnerships with cosmetics companies to run those trials and create revenue-generating services."

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