Data Scientists love averages the way tigers love pepper. We all know that averages of numbers (by definition!) regress towards the mean. But the weird thing is that when you average faces, instead of numbers, the result is a face which is more attractive than any of its constituents. For example, here's the average of a number of male and female Sydneysider faces (it's not clear how many), with some of the constituent faces in between:
This image is a detail of a poster from The Face of Tomorow, and vitual modern art exhibition at "The Contemporary Art Museum Saint Gery" in virtual world Second Life. You can find there averages of citizens of other cities too, including London, Paris and Toronto.
I found this exhibition while trying to find the source of this image, which was doing the rounds a couple of weeks ago. As far as I can tell, the source is this blog from which I guess someone created a composite of all the female figures. (If someone wants to do the same with the male figures, please do!) I'm guessing the averages themselves were made with the face averaging tool from faceresearch.org.
The Face of Tomorrow: Posters
Since symmetry is aesthetically pleasing (in people at least), you'd expect that averaging out the asymmetries in people's faces would lead to a more pleasing result. Same as financial portfolio diversification, really.
(But really, personality is more important than beauty, isn't it? :-)
Cheers,
JCS
Posted by: Jose C Silva | February 25, 2011 at 12:02
yes its because the faces have been made more symmetrical, and appear to have been heavily airbrushed.
Posted by: tash | August 21, 2011 at 05:07