What makes a good photo? Or rather, what makes for a good selfie? Is taking a good selfie an art form, or is there science behind it? Perhaps a bit of both, and if the researchers at the University of Waterloo have it their way, perhaps soon our smartphones and cameras could even give us directions and instructions on how to snap the best selfie.
The researchers have recently put together an algorithm in which it is apparently capable of determining the best selfie. How the algorithm was put together involved thousands of Mechanical Turk workers to rate artificial selfies to find the best choice across three different factors, such as lighting direction, face size, and position, and from there they created an app that would help act as a director of sorts to the user when it came to taking selfies.
They then asked real people to then try taking selfies with and without the app, and apparently based on the feedback they got from the raters on Mechanical Turk, they found a 26% improvement in the ratings in the selfies taken with the app, compared to those taken without the app.
One of the study’s co-authors Dan Vogel writes, “This is just the beginning of what is possible. We can expand the variables to include variables aspects such as hairstyle, types of smile or even the outfit you wear. When it comes to teaching people to take better selfies, the sky’s the limit.”