My Heritage Mashups

April 12, 2007 D. H. McKee

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Everyone seems to be playing around with My Heritage recently, checking in pictures of their faces, trying to get an idea of what their celebrity look-alike would be. If only facial recognition technology (that’s available for free, online) was any good. While I wasn’t expecting much from a site unable to recognize two different Julia Roberts photos from the web, I figured I’d play around with it a bit, and see how accurate it was. I always figured I was sort of a cross between John Cusack, Patrick Stewart, and Dr. Thaddeus Venture.
Here’s me. I’m not pretty, I just look that way:

Here’s me on My Heritage. I apparently look like everyone from Warren G. Harding to Jessica Lange :

Here’s another My Heritage image, taken 2 seconds later. I match no one from the previous attempt, but now I resemble Angelina Jolie (I’m not too surprised by this), and Ronald Reagan (must be my vacant stare).

Then I tried doing a My Heritage on Futurama’s Bender:

He didn’t match up against anything. That’s too bad. I was certain he was going to look like John Malkovich.

My there.com avatar did get some matches. Huh. Carson Daly, Jewel, John Cusack. OK, sure.

Here’s where I decided to have some fun and try mashing up My Heritage with Perception Laboratory’s Face Transformer. This is pretty neat if you get get it to work properly. You need just the right image, otherwise the image looks horribly deformed. I made an old version of me (yikes!!)…

… and an ape-man version (double-yikes!!):

My “old-guy” face matched up with respectable big-time celebs, like Ehud Olmert, Shimon Peres, Clint Eastwood. Oh, and Nicholas Case (oooh, burn).

My “ape-man” face matched (strangely) with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Peter Ustinov. Crazy.

Eh, from what I’ve seen, the technology isn’t as accurate as it could be. The system gets easily confused by accessories, such as glasses, facial hair, and your haircut. Bald guys get matched up against bald celebs, old people with old celebs, and monkey-men with Peter Ustinov, for some reason. When I put on glasses, I suddenly look like Jack Osbourne, but when I take them off, I’m Angelina Jolie.
It is kind of fun, though. I can see why people are doing it.

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About This Site

As a guy who occasionally curates art shows and wrangles artists together, I often have to edit and post artist bios, profile pictures, and artwork images. This can be a problem, since many artists and writers aren’t used to selling themselves. Artists rarely know how to present their art for display in a brochure, and writers aren’t used to writing about themselves.

Writers often treat the bio like it’s an interview or something. Maybe like they’re having a conversation with you, the reader. While it may work sometimes, the most common way to write a bio is to write in the 3rd person.

I’m like those writers, and I’m talking to you directly, unlike the common way to do a bio. You should see my About page. It makes sense to me, since this is a bit which describes my blog’s website. When I get famous enough that I don’t have time to talk to you, I’ll have an intern write everything in 3rd person. Until then, you get to talk to me.

Like blogs of old, this one is a personal document of the comings and goings of me. Articles I’ve written, links I’ve posted, videos I liked, etc. Here, a first-person perspective is the way to go, at least for now. So, this is my site. I’m D. H. McKee, a sometimes artist, sometimes writer. Mostly just a guy on the internet.