If you love taking selfies, but do not know how to take the best shot, there is help at hand. Computer scientists have developed a smartphone app that helps people learn the art of taking a cellphone self-portrait. The app directs the user where to position the camera allowing them to take the best shot possible.
Just the beginning of what is possible: Vogel
- “Selfie’s have increasingly become a normal way for people to express themselves and their experiences,
- only not all selfies are created equal,” said Dan Vogel, Professor of Computer Science at University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.
- “Unlike other apps that enhance a photo after you take it, this system gives direction, meaning the user is actually learning why their photo will be better,” Vogel said.
- In developing the algorithm, Vogel and Qifan Li, a former student at Waterloo, bought 3D digital scans of “average” looking people.
- They took hundreds of “virtual selfies” by writing code to control a virtual smartphone camera and
- computer-generated lighting which allowed them to explore different composition principles,
- including lighting direction, face position and face size.
- Using an online crowdsourcing service, the researchers had thousands of people vote on which of
- the virtual selfie photos they felt were best, and then mathematically modelled the patterns
- of votes to develop an algorithm that can guide people to take the best selfie.
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- Based on more online ratings, they found a 26 per cent improvement in selfies taken with Waterloo’s app.
- The researchers presented the work at the 2017 ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems in Edinburgh, Scotland.
- “This is just the beginning of what is possible,” Vogel said.
- “We can expand the variables to include variables aspects such as hairstyle, types of smile or even the outfit you wear.
- When it comes to teaching people to take better selfies, the sky’s the limit,” Vogel said in addition.
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