Friday Eye Candy: Is That Mountain Range Staring at Me?

Google Faces is a fun, and slightly freaky, project that plays off of humans' penchant for seeing faces in everything by testing if a computer could do the same.

1 minute read

June 14, 2013, 2:00 PM PDT

By Jonathan Nettler @nettsj


"We humans tend to see faces where they don’t actually exist," writes Liz Stinson. "Clouds, the moon, grilled cheese; it’s all a canvas for our imaginations. The psychological tendency to see meaningful images in vague visuals actually has a name—pareidolia—and it’s the basis for a mesmerizing new project."

"Berlin-based design studio Onformative created Google Faces, an algorithm-based system that searches Google Maps’ satellite images for landscapes that resemble the human face. The design team, made of up Cedric Kiefer and Julia Laub, stumbled on the idea after previous facial recognition projects kept generating false positives (detecting facial images where there are none)."

Friday, May 31, 2013 in Wired

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I love the variety of courses, many practical, and all richly illustrated. They have inspired many ideas that I've applied in practice, and in my own teaching. Mary G., Urban Planner

I love the variety of courses, many practical, and all richly illustrated. They have inspired many ideas that I've applied in practice, and in my own teaching.

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