Caradt researcher Martine Stig is looking for testers for her newly launched platform Wealgo
. If you want to take part in a test group, please contact Martine Stig, me.stig@avans.nl.
Wealgo
Wealgo
blends face recognition software with video-meetup spaces. It’s an online gathering of customized biometric avatars driven by face recognition algorithms … a carnivalesque public playground, where Alter Algos meet. Wealgo enables you to customise your biometric self and meet other Alter Algo’s. Anonymous yet creating embodied experiences, it invites to playfully operate in the shadow or empowers to reinvent identity. Between face and mask, the biometric self merges former dichotomies and consolidates occupant and cloak, alter and ego, creating real experiences in a magical world.
To Play or to Profile …
Algoritms – as humans? – are trained to profile. This fixation of inherently fluid concepts such as: time, identity, ethnicity, gender, religion, clearly presents thé predicament our time is currently facing. WeAlgo aims to provide a space to play not to profile. By decoding the visual language of human ánd non-human, both are lost in translation and 68 facial landmarks a canvas to play with. Come and dance with other false-positives! We do not collect, store, share or sell data.
Private Space
Face recognition is based on the detection of meaningful biological facial landmarks and the extraction of this geometry into a set of – in our case 68 – predefined (x,y)-coordinates for: mouth, eyebrows, eyes, nose and jaw. This technology – ubiquitously used in AR-, law enforcement or entertainment applications – is the basis for your customisable avatar, the vehicle that allows us to be personally present, without surrendering our screen privacy. It both safeguards our private live whilst it makes transparent the information our effigies implicitly provide.
Cut Pollution
Instead of distributing compressed video streams, WeAlgo streams data points, which significantly reduces bandwidth, costs and thus carbon footprint. HD video conferencing bandwidth requirements run between 2-3 Mbps(up/down)* per user. Multiply this by the average time spent on a call (1hr) to end up with an average total of 810MB data per user per call.
Interested?
If you want to take part in a test group, please contact Martine Stig, me.stig@avans.nl.