“It starts off with “huh?”, a sense of mystification about what the algorithm could be responding to. Then there’s a kind of aesthetic of the glitch. “Oh it’s a screw up, how funny and slightly troubling”. But then finally, the more of these I saw, the more the effect started to feel truly other: like a coherent, but alien idea of what faces were. It made me wonder what I was missing. “What is it seeing there?”
Hit Counter by Zach Gage uses face recognition to count (and display) the number of people that have looked at it.
“It is a throwback to the early days of the internet when hit counters were proudly displayed as signs of social status, re-contextualized into the gallery environment.”
TLD (aka Predator) is an algorithm for tracking of unknown objects in unconstrained video streams. The object of interest is defined by a bounding box in a single frame. TLD simultaneously tracks the object, learns its appearance and detects it whenever it appears in the video. The result is a real-time tracking that typically improves over time.
“A camera fixed on the concrete cube sculpture recognizes the presence of human faces within its scope. With a randomized choice it will focus on one of the bystanders and adjust its movement to his; tracking the eye movements of the viewer, a software computes the corresponding angle of view projecting onto the cube the very section of the space the sculpture is blocking from the viewers eye; thus making the cube appear transparent.”
Pallette and UT Pallette are $50,000 Japanese mannequins that change their pose when they “sense” people looking at them. It’s all based on motion capture with proximity sensors at the moment but their designer Tatsuya Matsu, boss of Flower Robotics says that future versions will feature face recognition.
”It makes the product the mannequin wears look more attractive, increasing consumers’ appetite to buy”. He also says “Consumer attention would be diverted to the face if there were one.” which explains why they look the way they do. They’re avoiding the uncanny valley.
