Tinder built its app empire on the idea that dating is superficial, so now, multiple students at the New Jersey Institute of Technology are leaning into that idea. They have developed a new dating app called FaceDate that relies on a facial recognition algorithm to generate potential matches.
When setting up an account, users upload photos of people they find attractive. The app will then suggest people who match their preferences. There probably isn’t a George Clooney in the mix, but maybe there’s someone with peppered hair or kind eyes. Who knows!
The app definitely sounds slightly off-putting, but I’ve thought about this idea before. I’m sure you could identify my “type” if you aggregated my Tinder swipes. I like to imagine I equally swipe right on anyone — and in my mind, I don’t exclude people who look a certain way or have a certain feature — but I’m sure an algorithm could find a pattern to my swipes. An app like FaceDate might streamline online dating by filtering out people you’re less likely to swipe right on, and in the future, tailored matches would make more sense as a focus, particularly in big cities with thousands of users.
The FaceDate team hopes to bring the Android-based app to iOS this year and to roll their app out to their fellow students in the coming months.