Google has added an interesting face morphing app in Orkut. The app takes your profile image from Orkut and smoothly morphs it into your friend’s profile image while filling the path with public images of other Orkut users who have matching faces.
The application, known as People Hopper, is part of Google Labs but for some reason, it didn’t work with my Orkut account. Contrary to what you may think, face morphing in Orkut doesn’t due “face recognition” and is just a simple matching to find similar pictures.
First, faces are automatically detected in public profile images and normalized for improved contrast and size. Then, for each image, we find other publicly available profile images that are similar to one another. Then, when you pick a friend you want to be your end match, we just hop along similar public images, step-by-step, until the connection is made!
If you don’t want your Orkut images to show up in another person’s morph, you can click here to exclude your Orkut profile from the Google experiment. For extra fun, you can extract the individual images from the morph sequence and turn them into animated gif.
