Google LLC has come up with a clever way to combine its face recognition technology with its educational museum app, Google Arts & Culture. Using artificial intelligence, the app’s newest update can help museum visitors find their lookalike in nearby paintings, sculptures and other artwork.

To access the new feature, users take a selfie with the Google Arts & Culture app, which then uses Google’s AI to find the art subject with the closest match. The app shows a side-by-side comparison between the selfie and the artwork, along with a percentage of how similar the two pictures are to each other. Users can share the comparison image on social media, and the app also tells them where they can find the piece with their art doppelganger.

The face matching feature only works for certain museums at the moment, but Google Arts & Culture has partnerships with many famous museums around the world, so it is likely that the feature will expand to more locations in the future. Google also made the strange decision to lock the selfie feature to only the U.S. region, despite the fact that it can find matches in museums around the world. Some users in the U.S. said they can’t the access the feature either, and it’s unclear when Google will make it more widely available.

The Google Arts & Culture app’s face recognition feature could help bring exposure to different museums and draw in visitors who want to see their art doubles in person. The feature could also be valuable source of data for Google, since it could provide the company with thousands of new images that it can use to further train its computer vision machine learning algorithms.

This is not the first time Google has used its Arts & Culture app to show off what some of its new technology can do. In 2016 Google added virtual reality tours of famous historical landmarks such as the Parthenon, and the app has another computer vision feature that uses a smartphone’s camera to recognize artwork and provide additional information on it. Museums have also previously partnered with Google to use its technologies for their own programs, such as when several museums used Google’s Tango AR platform to enhance their exhibits with augmented reality experiences.

Photo: Google