APC administrator03 July 2006, 7:44 AM
Now whenever anybody says You remind me of someone. . ., you can just tap a few keys on your computer and reply Serena Williams -- like, duh.
Over the years, this salty old hack has watched many of the technologies which furnish our most fantastical dreams become realities. They start as the apple in the eye of a budding Asimov and eventually reach our kitchens, living rooms and pockets.
Some notable examples include the automated food machine, capably provided in the form of the freezer/microwave team. And mobile phones are the closest we've come to telepathy -- even more so if you affect a look of grave concentration whilst talking on one.
Biometric technology has never really made it, however. Sure, you can buy a USB fingerprint scanner to lock unauthorised users from your PC, but it's still not reliable enough to count on in most circumstances.
Enter MyHeritage.com, with the promise of powerful face recognition algorithms powering mundane commercial software. It's a genealogy-tracking application which will be informed (over time) by collecting the images of the service's users for use in comparisons.
How it will shape up in the end is anyone's guess, but the company has enough faith in their code to allow users to sign up for a free account and play with the Macromedia-Flash-powered interface used to compare photos. Currently, the only set of photos available for comparison is a celebrity database of 3,200 images -- more than enough material for you to find a good-looking lookalike.
So does it work? Well, we tried it out here at APC and were reasonably impressed. Now whenever anybody says "You remind me of someone. . .", I'll just reply "Serena Williams -- like, duh":
The tech writers have a fortress of solitude in our office they call APC Labs, and in it is some of the most abused and mistreated hardware you will ever see. One of the poor beasts hosts a folder full of images, aptly titled WTF. That's where the following material came from:
Give it a go and tell us what you think. If you have any funny results, put them on Flickr and drop a link in with your comment.
Source: Gawker