Avatars Used For Australian Online Sex Appeal Study

An anonymous reader writes "Australian scientists are seeking volunteers online to help them better understand sexual attraction. At a specially created website — www.bodylab.biz — users can go online and make their own ratings of computer-generated avatar images of men and women of greatly varying shapes, sizes, and proportions. The bodyLab team will analyse and compile the results and each month will cull about half of the images — those that are least popular — and virtually 'breed' new body shapes from parent avatars with features rated as most attractive by people taking part in the experiment. Over time, the scientists hope thousands of users will help them work through six or more generations of avatars to narrow down the special combinations of features that make up the 'ideal' body — although they're keeping an open mind about whether several combinations will emerge."

Comments

Well that was obnoxious

[senorbum]

Its honestly quite difficult to tell which grey cartoon body model is more attractive. I tried doing it, but I really just felt like I was making the ratings up...There are a few that looked like ogres that I could tell weren't attractive to me, but honestly that was about it.

Re:Well that was obnoxious

[Fluffeh]

so what would the point be?

Yeah, I did it too, what a horrible bunch of models. It seems as if the whole thing only has one sliding scale for inflating the model.

Also, the site just timed out three times when I tried to get their "overall progress" stats due to a sql timeout error. Stay classy bodylab.

Misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

The test really was seeing how attractive fat women are to most people. None of the figures were what I'd consider thin and only one wasn't obviously fat. They were various shapes of fat but still fat. There are lots of body types that aren't fat. They'd save 10 minutes of the testers time to first find out do you find fat women attractive. If yes proceed otherwise you are now finished with the test.

That's not how men work

[AftanGustur]

A normal guy wouldn't rate a woman 0-10 in his head, but rather a "yes" or a "no",
Also. this "experiment" while interesting doesn't count for men getting horny, looking at pictures of naked women makes us horny, after a while our "reptilian brain" takes over and almost everything looks attractive.

It would be interesting to measure that in the data ... How after 5-8 clicks, every fat blob gets increased sex appeal.