Google's Museum App Finds Your Fine Art Doppelganger (engadget.com)

The latest update to the Google Arts & Culture app now lets you take a selfie, and using image recognition, finds someone in its vast art collection that most resembles you. It will then present you and your fine art twin side-by-side, along with a percentage match, and let you share the results on social media. Engadget reports: The app, which appears to be unfortunately geo-restricted to the United States, is like an automated version of an article that circulated recently showing folks standing in front of portraits at museums. In many cases, the old-timey people in the paintings resemble them uncannily, but, other than in rare cases, that's not the case at all with Google's app. Google matched me with someone who doesn't look like me in the slightest, a certain Sir Peter Francois Bourgeois, based on a painting hanging in Dulwich Picture Gallery. Taking a buzz around the internet, other folks were satisfied with their matches, some took them as a personal insult, and many were just plain baffled, in that order.

Comments

Bit by bit

[BlacKSacrificE]

The cynic in me see's this as just another ploy by Google to give up biometric data. And people will happily feed the machine without so much as a second thought because they want to see which artwork they look like? Is that really worth the cost?

Building a face database

[QuietLagoon]

A nice way to get people to submit a good image of their face so that google can build a database of faces and try to catch up to facebook in this area.