Beautiful Bastards
If you hate looking at pictures of yourself like I do, then you’re going to love what researchers at Tel Aviv University have come up with.
They’ve built a Beauty Machine that takes a picture of your ugly face, manipulates the image, and then spits out a photo of a more beautiful you.
In short, it’ll help you visually lie about how you look on Facebook. This will go along perfectly with all those other lies you slap up on Facebook to try to make yourself look more interesting and cuter than you really are (e.g. all that nonsense you write in the “Interests” section. As if you’re really into Nietzsche, dancing naked, and bubble baths).
Here’s a sampling of some before-and-after photos which show the Beauty Machine in action:
Samples of photos manipulated by the Beauty Machine. Original photos on top, manipulated ones on the bottom. Looks like the machine made Lincoln uglier.
If you’re wondering how the machine knows what beauty is, Professor Daniel Cohen-Or of the Blavatnik School of Computer Sciences at Tel Aviv University says this:
“Beauty can be quantified by mathematical measurements and ratios. It can be defined as average distances between features, which a majority of people agree are the most beautiful. I don’t claim to know much about beauty. For us, every picture in this research project is just a collection of numbers.”
So there you have it, guys. Next time you get an unexplained boner you’ll now know why. Numbers. You were probably doing some kind of quadratic equation in your head and that made you hornier than a two-peckered Billy Goat.
In the future this technology could be used as a guide for plastic surgeons, and it may even be a function on your digital camera. So instead of having to photoshop the hell out of all your pictures, you and your friends can live the lie in real time.
(via Science Daily)
