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Microsoft website How-old.net is a an overnight success. Intended as a preview to what Windows 10 is about to bring out, the site is getting a massive amount of attention. Since one of the most impressive features of Windows 10 will be the option of face recognition log-in, How-old.net spun off as a teaser for this.
What you can do is go on the website and upload a photo of yourself or of somebody else and the site will try to guess how old the person in the picture is, based solely on face recognition.
Naturally, this led to an endless amount of amusing situations, since people observed that they had different ages in different pictures. So this led to a frenzy revolving around the question “How old do I look like this?”. Thanks to How-old.net, this question has all the chances of becoming as famous as “Does this make me look fat?” among people concerned with their image.
And to be fair, who isn’t concerned about how they look? To make it clear, the site does not use actual data about the person, so the age rendered is pretty much the IT version of subjective. So don’t take it too seriously!
The website was created by Microsoft using several of its products, including Bing and Microsoft Azure, its famous cloud service. “We wanted to create an experience that was intelligent and fun could capture the attention of people globally so we looked at the APIs available in the Azure Machine Learning Gallery.” said the Machine Learning Blog team.
The team expected around 50 people to try out the feature and then report the feed-back, but the numbers were overwhelming. “We were shocked. Within a few hours, over 35,000 users had hit the page from all over the world”, they reported.
It seems that everyone wanted to find out just how old they looked to a computer, because this is the closest thing to the truth. “What a great example of people having fun thanks to the power of ML!”
But if you think about just how much people are affected by social-media, how much time they spend building an online persona and how much they try to live up to if afterwards, you cannot help thinking about the enormous amount of people who will be visiting cosmetic surgery clinics in the near future.
Since there are medical procedures that promise to make you look like you do in you selfies after you’ve applied your favorite filters, this website has all the chances to generate a wide range of requests from patients, from a little bit of Botox here and there to “make me look like I do in this picture”.
Overall, How-old.net is an overnight-success and this is only the beginning of the hype it is capable of generating! So hold tight, and stick around until it reaches full capacity. And then take a moment to think just how popular Windows 10 is going to be!
Image Source: pbs.twimg.com
