I’m far from the first to discover myheritage.com, but I discovered it today. Myheritage.com is a website designed to keep families in touch. The site’s primary purpose two-fold: to create a family web base that enables families to stay in touch with photos, videos, bulletin boards; and secondly to provide a premium tool to research genealogy.
I admit I didn’t do either. I played with the celebrity look-alike tool. It’s very simple to use. Find a good photograph of yourself in your computer files. The technology works best with a front-facing photo. I cropped photos down to the face to make smaller files that would load faster. It also allowed the face recognition technology to work more rapidly.
Once the photo is uploaded, the program detects the face in the photograph. The face recognition technology then runs, based on logarithms associated with your face shape and size. Myheritage.com then searches a database of thousands of celebrities. In a small box, your celebrity look-alike’s name and photo are displayed.
I missed the advance button on the celebrity look-alike card the first time through. It is on the bottom right-hand side. It will take you to the celebrity whom you next most resemble. The matches are rated on a percentage scale to 100%. Matches are sorted by gender, but based on the logarithms you can be matched with both males and females. That is one of the things that makes the site fun, and very funny.
My photo didn’t have a match any greater than 53%. It was Jamie Lee Curtis. A 53% match with Jamie Lee is okay. Of course, a match with someone more glamorous would have been flattering, but it’s not me. In fact, the first photo I uploaded said there were no matches. I had to laugh. I’m guessing I’m either pretty unique, or look like Quasimodo and he isn’t in the database.
We had a lot of fun running family pictures through the software. Some of the characteristic matches are obviously based on the shape of your nose, breadth of your smile, dimples, double chins, length of your face, and so on. Some of the matches come pretty close, but some are way off base except for one matching characteristic. If you don’t mind laughing at yourself you will find these matches pretty interesting.
The site has a few other tools, if you really get into this. You can morph your own picture into a celebrity to upload to MySpace or Facebook. There is also a celebrity collage feature that places your face in the middle with your celebrity look-alikes all around you.
I don’t break away from work very often to play, but this held my interest for a while. I uploaded every photo of every family member I could find. Some of the matches were hysterical, others were unbelievable.
There were a lot of laughs at my house playing on this website.
Why not visit myheritage.com with your family and friends and have some fun, too?
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