Face of BIO 2011
Showcased on the Innovation Ireland stand at the recent BIO2011 conference was The Face of BIO, a project which was completed with Science Gallery Dublin (http://www.sciencegallery.com/) and the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience (http://neuroscience.tcd.ie/).
Using specially designed software, which the research team has obtained from an affiliate lab in St. Andrews University, Edinburgh, they created individual face maps of each participant and use face morphing software to create an average face image.
Previous research in this area has shown that ‘averageness’ is an attractive quality when it comes to judging facial aesthetics. It may seem counterintuitive that looking average is particularly attractive but it is theorised that averageness is attractive because it captures and epitomizes the overall “style “ of the human faces to which we have been repeatedly exposed, and this style has acquired extra resonance for our pattern-recognising visual system.
The 75 face stimuli collected during BIO2011 will be used in future research in Trinity College Dublin in the form of a new SFI funded project called Captavatar which will be supervised by Profs. Fiona Newell & Carol O’Sullivan, TCD. Taking into account input from a range of disciplines like Psychology, Neuroscience, and Computer Science, this project aims to infer what the appealing qualities of iconic human faces are, and how to implement these particular qualities when creating avatars for use in education and training, gaming and entertainment, and health care.
Average Male Face of BIO Average Female Face of BIO
Average Androgynous face of BIO
