Most people are building augmented reality applications that will have positive impacts on our lives; leading the way when we get lost and connecting us to people across the world. Death Mask offers slightly more morbid assistance; it predicts when you’ll die.
Yes, this iPad app from developers Or Fleisher and Anastasis Germanidis really does make a guess at when you and your friends are going to die using Apple’s ARKit platform. Just hold your handset up to someone’s face and you’ll see an AR overlay of their very own death mask — which in history was made following a person’s death taken directly from the corpse — complete with a prediction of how many years they have left to live. Cheery.
Fleisher tells UploadVR that the app uses a machine learning model called AgeNet for its prediction process. Fleisher explains that the model takes an image of a person and breaks it down into smaller pieces of information that can be used to predict someone’s age.
Of course, you shouldn’t actually depend on the app’s estimations of when you’re going to die, but it’s a pretty fun experiment. “The project is by no means an accurate representation of one’s life expectancy and is more oriented towards the examination of public information in augmented reality in the age of deep learning,” Fleisher says.
To his point, the thought that anyone could gain even speculative information such as this just by pointing their phone at a stranger’s face is an unsettling one. As we enter a new age of information, this is a good example of the fresh dangers we’re opening ourselves up to.
