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On Pareidolia

General Technology PareidoliaMitchell Gerskup
Mitchell Gerskup @ October 7th, 2008

Today, while at work, I was filming a site using a new high definition camcorder with face recognition technology. The camera is impressive, and usually good at picking up faces: front profiles, side profiles, on weird angles — it usually recognizes a face. So what interested me was when it started indicating that there was a face in a piece of fiberglass insulation, which was being removed from a wall. The indicator flashed two or three times, but only very briefly. While I doubt that the camera saw the face of Jesus, it made me start to wonder how in our pursuit to design machines that mimic the human brain, what type of other human phenomena we would see begin to appear in our technology.

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1 response so far ↓

  • 1
    Beyondpareidoliac // Oct 7, 2008 at 6:20 pm

    A sound recognition machine which already exists could be used in a similar fashion to detect paraudolia.

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