First, there is only a blur of shifting gray fragments. Shapes that look like they've been scissored out by a hyperactive two-year old spiral around the screen. Then, pieces start to fall into place. There's something there: an eye, a crook of a mouth, a sea captain's hat, a beard...a pair of full lips, no, a chin... The computer program Pareidoloop
, developed by programmer Phil McCarthy
, plays with our natural tendency to see faces in everything, a phenomenon called pareidolia
. First it layers random polygons on each other and then sics a facial recognition algorithm on the results. Each time the random placement of a shape makes the image look more like a face, the software notes it, and gradually the program builds a face from the noise. Above are the "faces" we got from running the program over the last few hours. Each one has its ...
