Can you really predict the traits of someone using a small downloadable program that analyses their face? That's the theory behind the sub-4MB download that makes up Digital Physiognomy. It's easily one of the most fascinating ideas we've come across for a piece of software in some time, albeit tempered by the fear that we were entering gimmick central.

Nonetheless, in we ventured and we quickly realised that we had a bit of work to do. The program claims to be able to read faces, but in order for it to do so you need to do a bit of sketching.

There's no automatic scanning of a picture, as you've seen no doubt in an abundance of science fiction movies. At best you can load in a picture of a person and do your best to recreate them by referring to that. It's all a bit of a pain, truth be told, as effectively you're putting together a photofit of a person, when you have a proper picture of them being displayed in the same program.

Still, grumbles aside, on we pressed. As we gradually compiled our photofit, we noticed that on the side of the screen a character profile was building up. This was initially fascinating to see, and our choices were allowing the program to make quite bold judgements on a person.

Bar graphs tallied up traits such as egotism, conformism, laziness, slyness, intellect, self-confidence, humour, luck and sexual activity. Then a circular graph at the top of the screen plotted where a person's personality traits lay, against labels such as melancholic, extrovert, sanguine and activity.

We learnt some interesting things. Basically, every change of nose, hairstyle, mouth - in fact pretty much any physical characteristic - affects the output from the program. So we set out to find out what would turn the sex activity bar up to the max (cough).

Triangular and narrow eyes are clearly better than large eyes, the latter incidentally sending the humour bar entirely into green. The mouth has nothing to do with it, meanwhile eyebrow alterations turned our face into a traveller, for some reason.

The program has a confidence factor built in, that gauges how happy it is with its predictions, but chances are you'll have reached your own conclusions first. That's because Digital Physiognomy should surely be treated as a bit of fun and little more. There may be some interesting science behind what the program is digging at, but there's precious little sign of it here.

Instead you end up adjusting someone's nose and finding out that means they're less lucky, simply because the program tells you so. It never explains why and, with the lack of a picture scanning mode too, this pigeonholes a potentially interesting application as a bit of a novelty, sadly. Even at $19.99, there's little to justify the outlay.

Verdict
Fun for a while, but of questionable use beyond that. It's too laboured and too remote to really convince you of what it's telling you, sadly.

Company: Uniphiz

Tags: trait theory photofit arts person literature facebook body image canadian obesity network