Google’s Art Selfie feature has gone live in Kenya and other countries across the globe. The new tool that connects art lovers with thousands of art pieces that resemble their face from art galleries across the world went live yesterday.
Experiments for the tool started in the US in January before it was rolled out to other global markets.
Art Selfie is a tool powered by computer vision technology based on machine learning. When you take a selfie, your photo is compared with faces in artworks our museum partners have provided. After a short moment, you will see your results along with a percentage to estimate the visual similarity of each match and your face.
Your selfie becomes a doorway into art—tap on your lookalike to discover more information about it or an artist that perhaps you’ve never heard of before.
Together with partner museums, Google says it is constantly experimenting with new ways for people to discover and interact with art. In the same spirit, the company says you should keep an eye out for Art Selfie as an option in Google Lens on Android next time you use Lens on artwork.
“The Google Arts & Culture platform hosts millions of artifacts and pieces of art, ranging from prehistory to the contemporary, shared by museums across the world. To ease the prospect of exploring all that art, we dreamt up a fun solution: connect people to art by way of a fundamental artistic pursuit, the search for the self … or, in this case, the selfie,” said Charles Murito, Google Kenya Country Manager.
Google Arts & Culture puts over 1,500 museums at your fingertips. It’s an immersive way to explore art, history and wonders of the world from Van Gogh’s bedroom paintings to Mandela’s prison cell. The Google Arts & Culture app is free and available on the web, on iOS and Android.
According to Google, Art Selfie has been incredibly popular. Over 78 Million matches have been made to date. Google has also collaborated closely with over 650 partner institutions from around the word to make the experiment available globally.
Art Selfie is within the Google Arts & Culture app on Android and iOS (App version 6.4 +)
