2010 is billed to be the year of many things: the tablet (if Wired and PC World are correct), the smartphone (going by some analysts and journalists), 3D TV (according to some) and of course, the Tiger (no relation to Apple's OS though I'm afraid). However, with all the hype and speculation, one trend that will be making its public debut in 2010 that has so far been missed by critics and foreseers alike is the new art of facemunging.

Before you recoil in horror trying to dream up the possibilities of what this might be, allow me to elaborate a little. But, in line with the old adage that 'a picture paints a thousand words', allow me to do it with an image. It's not a pretty image by any stretch of the imagination, and for those of you who know Ben or Eleanor personally, this will bear an extra, far more disturbing weight than usual. However, it displays perfectly the power of facemunging. Be warned; what follows is not for the faint of heart.

Ready? This is your last chance to turn back now.

Okay, here goes (but don't say I didn't warn you):

As you can probably tell from this, facemunging is either a form of black magic that should be forever confined to the past, or a face recognition program created in house here at Cogapp. I can happily tell you that it's the latter. Developed as an R & D project by our tech team, Facemunger is an app that identifies faces in an image being captured by a webcam, and swaps the locations of those faces on the screen. It does all this in real time, so you can see what the image will look like before you decide whether or not to capture it for posterity (whether or not you should is an entirely different question). It isn't limited to two people either: when three or more faces are recognised in the image, the application continuously randomises the position of these faces, creating different results each time the image is captured.

Facemunger was created last year when the team were following on from their exploration of face-recognition technology, which originally began in 2008 when we created the much loved People Pong. It comes at a time when we're looking into a variety of different technologies - from face recognition to augmented reality, radio frequency identification and a whole plethora of others that deserve far greater description than I can give them here.

The Facemunger app will be unveiled formally to the public at next month's Glug Brighton 2 (hosted by Crush and Agency Rush) meet and greet. The Glug events are where creatives go to 'not-work, rather than network', and this year the designers, artists and co. will be introduced to Facemunger, and be brought together in a very different way than they are likely to have expected. Colin gave a well received talk at last year's inaugural Glug Brighton, and there will be many a Cogapp face at February's event too. Though with Facemunger in tow, quite whose body those faces will be on is anyone's guess...

Check back here in February to read about the events of Glug 2 and see the more interesting creations the app produces there.