If you ever wanted a computer to not only tell you what your body fat percentage is, but also give you a ‘good looks’ rating, you’re in luck. Bodywhat, featured on Product Hunt, purports to do that and more — from a single photo.
Here’s how it works.
First, you upload a “quality” picture of your upper body. This means with your arms relaxed and absolutely no flexing — this isn’t about cheating the algorithm. Then you upload the picture and fill in a few detail like height and weight.
Bodywhat takes it from there, 3D modeling your body and comparing it to its database to extrapolate different metrics about your body. It works by comparing different data points in your picture to a reference set of thousands of others.
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So, how accurate is it? Bodywhat purports its 95% confidence interval lays somewhere between ± 3.0% and ± 3.5%. The company also stresses that the accuracy will only get better over time, as more data is added to the set and the algorithm improves.
The most useful metric Bodywhat provides is your body fat percentage, but it also takes a dip into the strange. Bodywhat claims to be able to provide a rating of how sexy you are, by “comparing your body to own sexy rating as a weighted-average of those who look the most like you.”
Of course, this raises some questions: Is your sexiness determined by how closely your body resembles other “sexy” bodies? That’s one way of interpreting sexiness, but it seems very machine-like and rather cold.
The 3D model that Bodywhat makes of your body can also be manipulated to give you a glimpse into alternate futures. You can see what you’d look like with a few extra pounds of muscle, or fat, in a function called “Body Morphing” — a feature whose name you could argue is a bit too similar to “body dysmorphia.”
To round it off, Bodywhat can tell you what celebrities you most closely resemble from a body-centric perspective. Bear in mind, you might be going up against Justin Bieber’s Photoshopped abs.
And one final consideration. You might want to crop your head out of the photo, just to be safe. Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover certainly is. “I’m going to try this when I’m in the privacy of my own home, strategically positioning my head outside the frame because I’m skeptical where these photos are going,” he wrote.
You can never be too careful on the internet.
You can try out Bodywhat for yourself by clicking here — but keep in mind the website has been going offline intermittently, possibly to server issues.
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