LOOKALIKES ON YOUR CELLPHONE
Are you an Uma Thurman lookalike, or maybe a spitting image of Ernest Borgnine? Twin Factor, a new service being developed by Softhouse Nordic, based in Malmo, Sweden, will be able to reveal which famous face best matches your own. You will begin by taking a photo of yourself with a camera phone and sending it via the phone鈥檚 multimedia message service (MMS) to Twin Factor.
The company said at the CeBIT consumer electronics fair in Hannover, Germany, last week that it will then use facial-recognition software to compare your face with thousands of movie stars, politicians and TV sitcom characters stored on its database. When it makes a match it sends you an MMS that reveals your famous twin along with a short animation of your face morphing into that of the celebrity.
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SMALL-SCREEN SHOOTOUT
You have dozens of pictures on your cellphone, but what to do with them? Thanks to a gadget launched last week by Sony Ericsson, you can display them on a television screen. The MMV100 plugs into the TV鈥檚 SCART socket or composite video inputs and includes a receiver that can pick up pictures sent by Bluetooth-equipped phones.
The TV will display the last picture sent to it. It can be set to respond to any phone within range or locked to one phone only. If left unlocked, however, it might spring a few surprises 鈥� by displaying pictures unwittingly sent from a phone in the house next door, for example. 鈥淲e hadn鈥檛 thought of that,鈥� a spokesman for the company admitted.
TV YOU CAN CLICK ON
Buying the same jacket worn by your favourite singer may soon be simply a matter of clicking on it while watching the movie. The Russian company Active Video Technology, based in Moscow, has developed video-editing software that lets broadcasters turn any object in a movie into a clickable link when the movie is being watched on a computer. The software tracks characters throughout the movie and assigns them a unique URL.
Using the company鈥檚 downloadable software, clicking on such an object would, for example, automatically open a web page where it can be bought. The company demonstrated the system at CeBIT last week.
