Friday, August 24, 2007

Female faces

Two interesting videos, showing female faces in 500 years of Western art and in film.

I find both compilations visually fascinating. It is amazing how similar these nearly ideal female faces are to each other. We have pretty sophisticated hardwired capabilities for face-recognition; an alien species would probably conclude that we all look alike!



4 comments:

Christian Gross said...

You find these faces look alike? I thought some very similar, but others very disimilar.

Ok granted I have taken some courses in drawing faces. You learn how different and unique faces really are.

Steve Hsu said...

I probably wasn't very clear in the original post.

Humans are highly evolved to differentiate faces, but as I watch the face morphing in the video from a "geometric" perspective, I am struck that in some sense the faces are not changing very much from person to person.

That led to my comment that we are hypersensitive to subtle changes in human faces. I suppose it's the same for all species -- all dolphins look alike to me, but not to each other!

Unknown said...

Hi Steve,

You should construct a similar video out of female faces universally regarded as ugly and see what happens. You know, like Tolstoy would say, "All pretty faces are alike, all ugle faces are ugly in some unique way." Pretty female faces obey the constraints of symmetry, proportion, balance etc and so are rare. One bulbous nose, for example, would destroy a face. So I bet you that the ugly faces won't morph into each other so readily.

Celal Birader said...

Seeing the same morphing technology applied to produce videos of Black and Oriental women would make for an interesting and wider tribute to feminine beauty.

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