People Hopper is a new application for Orkut that lets you take your profile image and 'morph' it into your friend's–using publicly available images from other Orkut users along the way. It is a fun app that also allows you to make new connections–since the images that show in your Hopper all come from people who have chosen to make their profiles public, you can click through to learn more about them and reach out to them. You can also morph one friend into another. No computer graphics are used to generate the path.
How can I access the People Hopper gadget?
To be able to use People Hopper, one needs to have an Orkut account. If you don't already have one, create a new account here. Then, you can add the gadget by clicking on "add apps" under the "more" menu, or simply click here to: People Hopper
How to use?
The gadget starts with loading and displaying your friends images on the page. It shows two target boxes displaying "drag a friend here". One can drag a friend's picture in any of these two targets. Once there is an image in each of these boxes, the gadget returns the best path which transitions one face into another smoothly. Each face along the path comes from a Orkut user's public profile image. One can click on any of these path images and go to the profile of that person.
How does it work?
To generate a 'morph', People Hopper uses image matching technology. First, faces are automatically detected in public profile images and normalized for improved contrast and size. Then, for each image, we find other publicly available profile images that are similar to one another. Then, when you pick a friend you want to be your end match, we just hop along similar public images, step-by-step, until the connection is made! You can think of it as an image graph between friends, similar to the friendship graph already on Orkut. We don't use any face-specific features or metrics during this process. It is just a simple matching to find similar pictures.
Though other orkut user reported that this application is not working into their account but it seems to be working fine for my Orkut profile. Note: I tested this on Opera browser.
Have you tried this face morphing application yet? Do let me know if this is working for you or not.
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