It's not just humans who can experience pareidolia—seeing images of faces or other forms in the randomness that surrounds us. We can program machines to do it too. And if they're not looking for faces in the clouds then they're looking for faces on the surface of the earth.
Designer studio Onformative have created Google Faces, a project that uses an algorithm to look for faces on Google Maps."We were driven by the idea, to explore how the psychological phenomenon of pareidolia, could be generated by a machine." they say. They feed the algorithm satellite images so it can detect faces in the various landscapes as it virtually travels the globe.
And the search will continue over the coming months. "As it continues to travel the world within the upcoming months, it continuously zooms into the earth." Onformative explain. "This process decreases the step-size for each iteration and therefore increases the amount of images and travel time exponentially. Some of the detected images aren’t usable at all, as we are not able to recognize any face-like patterns within the detected images. Other satellite images, on the other hand, inspired our imagination in a tremendous, yet funny way. However the search goes on, as our diligent robot [continues it's] investigation."
Check out some of the results below.
[via The New Aesthetic]
This post originally appeared at Creators Project.