Imagine this: There’s a friend of yours you’ve had a crush on for some time but kept it a secret, or perhaps even a Facebook acquaintance you fancy. Sex cam site MegaCams wants to make it possible for you both to hook up, in the virtual sense.

The Belgian site hasn’t said what facial recognition technology it is using to make this happen, although reports suggest that it’s Microsoft’s Project Oxford and facial recognition tool, Face API. Developers can use Microsoft’s Face API up to 30,000 times for free, and after that it costs $1.50 per thousand uses.

MegaCams tells potential users that the technology makes you feel like “you are having live sex with the person in your picture.”  The site also claims that this option of choosing the face you like has never been done before, saying, “Searching for it [porn] using textual searches is very hard, that’s where technology comes in. Facial recognition is far more accurate than any textual search could be.”

Once you’ve sent MegaCams your image, you will then be sent back your doppelganger, and with that person you will also be given a percentage of how good a match there is with the image. Images are deleted by the site once the model has been chosen, lest any data might ever escape that reveals a user submitted an image of his best friend’s sister, or worse, his own sister.

One interesting point raised, concerning matters of privacy, is that from the database of 180,000 performers a doppelganger might actually end up being the real person. Then again, who would know?

How accurate is the feature? One female writer gave it a shot, saying that she was “underwhelmed” with the results. She added, “The algorithm appeared to judge my race as Asian or African-American/black based on facial features (I’m actually Caucasian).”

photo credit: Because one of these days, I swear I’ll explode… via photopin (license)>