#google faces

EU Fines Google for Skewing Searches

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EU fines Google a record $2.72 billion Bloomberg News The European Commission says the Internet giant breached EU antitrust rules.(More…)

For Google, fines loom, as antitrust regulators in the European Union are targeting the firm?s shopping service.(More…)

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Il cervello è un organo predittivo, costantemente in cerca di dare un senso al mondo, e quindi ipersensibile nella ricerca di modelli.

Se si osserva un cumulo di rocce in riva al mare che ci ricordano un corpo umano, oppure troviamo un viso nella corteccia di un albero,  è tutto normale, perchè stiamo sperimentando la pareidolia, un fenomeno che avviene nel nostro cervello che tende a ricondurre…

Google Faces by Onformative, 2013. Face detection searches for faces in Google Earth.

"Our Facetracker already circumnavigated the world a couple of times and astonished us with quite versatile results. As it continues to travel the world within the upcoming months, it continuously zooms into the earth. This process decreases the step-size for each iteration and therefore increases the amount of images and travel time exponentially. Some of the detected images aren’t usable at all, as we are not able to recognize any face-like patterns within the detected images. Other satellite images, on the other hand, inspired our imagination in a tremendous, yet funny way. However the search goes on, as our diligent robot continuous investigation."

Google Faces: Portraits of the Earth

Stars, clouds, grilled cheese – these are all places where humans have found imagery where there was none. At least, none of the imagery was deliberate. With our imagination, we humans often find symbols and meanings in ambiguous images. This psychological phenomenon, known as pareidolia, is the driving force behind Google Faces's fascinating portraits of Earth.

Julia Laub and Cedric Kiefer, founders of the Berlin studio Onformative, were curious to see if a machine was capable of replicating pareidolia. The duo came across the idea while engaged in a different project using the same face recognition technology. In order to search for instances of pareidolia, a computer operates Google Maps while a robot uses an algorithm to detect faces on the Earth's surface. With the aid of ofxBerkelium and a face tracking library made by Jason Saragih, Onformative's Facetracker has produced a surprising number of viable images.

Onformative's Facetracker has circled the planet several times and, although not all of its results produce obvious faces, the project has shown that machines are capable of replicating pareidolia.

To see more of Onformative's landscape portraits, click here.

(Sources: Onformative/Fast Company/Wired