Google is really trying hard to popularise its social networking site – Orkut (which is popular mostly in India and Brazil). Now the company has released a new application that allows users to morph their photos. This app is available in Google Labs and is currently in testing phase. Google is also allowing its users to add this application to their Orkut profile. And they have named the application as  People Hopper

This edition of techblog reviews this new application from Google.

Using People Hopper you can morph your Orkut profile pictures. All you have to do is to select a friend from your friend list. The application will then show the morphing of your profile photo to that of your friend. Here comes the fun fact – During the morphing process the application will also display the photos of other Orkut users who resemble you or your friend. (See the picture shown below)

In order to display a resembling image, the user should have set his privacy settings to ‘public’ so that the application has access to the photo. This interesting application helps you to add new friends who resemble your face. You can simply click on the photos displayed and visit the profiles of the users who resemble your face!

Adding the application

You can see the listing of the application by visiting this page  . If you like the development version, then you can go to this webpage and to click on the “Use People Hopper”. This will show you some facts that you need to know before adding the application to your profile (You need not worry about this unless you want to know the tech details).

You need to have an Orkut account for trying this application (If you don’t have one, you can create a new account here). Then you can add this new application by clicking on ‘add apps’ which is available under the ‘more’ menu (See the picture shown below). Then you can search for People Hopper and click on ‘Add application’.

Once you have done that the application will show you the photos of your friends on the ‘application page’. The page will also have two box areas where you can drag and drop your friends( just look for the boxes with the text ‘drag a friend here’). You need to add one photo to both these boxes. Then, the application will show the morphing process and will display all the transitions on the page. You may note that no computer graphics are used by the application.

This means that the transition photos are ‘original photos’ of other Orkut users. You can click on these photos to add more.

Technology behind the application

The application is using a method called ‘image matching technology’. This actually works quite akin to the  image recognition algorithms that we use in Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). But the difference is that this application can only tell how similar two faces are (not who they are). The application uses this technique and normalize (just like cropping) it to improve the contrast and size. Then it links each photo till the connection of complete.

Review

While meddling with this application, I found that the app is pulling only images of some of my friends. This could be due to the fact that for the smooth functioning of the app, the photos should be lucid and prominent – with a visible face.

Pros

• This application is developed by Google. So you have nothing to worry about the authenticity. You can trust this app!
• A new way to find ‘friends’
• It is really funny!

Cons

• The detection algorithm is not very effective. Sometimes the resemblance is very poor.
• The time taken for the process varies from few seconds to half a minute

If you really like the application you can update your settings so as to display the path in your profile updates (You need to click on the button ‘Show Path in My Updates’ for enabling this). And if you don’t like it, just follow the steps listed in the  Opt-Out Settings page.