Want to know how old you look? #HowOldRobot will tell you. The new Microsoft interface that judges an individual’s age from a photo is going viral as people around the world are uploading their photos to see just how close the system can get.
The face detection API is found at how-old.net and its popularity was completely unexpected for the two Microsoft engineers Corom Thompson and Santosh Balasubramanian.
“This is a fun story of how we were expecting perhaps 50 users for a test but — in the end — got over 35,000 users and saw the whole thing unfold in real time,”
the two wrote in a blog post. “We were playing with Microsoft’s newly released Face detection APIs through a webpage called http://how-old.net. This page lets users upload a picture and have the API predict the age and gender of any faces recognized in that picture. We sent email to a group of several hundred people asking them to try the page for a few minutes and give us feedback — optimistically hoping that at least 50 people would give it a shot. We monitored our real time analytics dashboard to track usage and, within a few minutes, the number of people using the site vastly exceeded the number of people we had sent our email to.”
Very quickly, the number of people trying out the page shot past 35,000.
And now, it’s everywhere, trending on social media with many posting their results online. Including stars like Piers Morgan:
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