Microsoft has revealed a new website that claims to be able to work out someone’s age just from just a picture. Called How old do I look, it allows people to analyze any image found on Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, or upload their own. Tell your age from a photo, and ask yourself, how old do I look?
It even allows users to search for celebrities – and see what Microsoft thinks their real ages are.
It is fun to use, but the ages vary wildly.
People uploaded photos taken of them on the same day and got a huge variance in the age it said they were.
The developers said, ‘We wanted to create an experience that was intelligent and fun could capture the attention of people globally, so we looked at the APIs available in the Azure Machine Learning Gallery,’. The system works by analyzing 27 points on the face. Called face landmarks, they are a series of specifically detailed points on a face; typically points of face components like the pupils, canthus or nose.
‘These attributes are predicted by using statistical algorithms and may not always be 100% precise. Still it is quite fun to try out. Hint on the photos, if you are using ones from your digital camera and have not re-sized them, they will not work. They have to be smaller than a straight digital file you may of downloaded.
Most people have no idea how huge those digital files really are.
Here is a group photo of some of us from the San Francisco Writer’s Conference volunteer meeting this year.
For some reason it missed one of us, and as for the rest, well let’s just say I think it is not exactly the most accurate tool yet!
Visit here and try it out. “How old do I look.net”
Another time wasting activity, halting your progress online with your real work. 🙂
Update: The Daily Mail tried it out on a bunch of staff and wrote about it here.