The Google Arts & Culture app featuring the newly added museum selfie match feature has gone viral on both Android and iOS. The feature allows you to find your “selfie doppelganger” by matching your selfies to objects in the Arts & Culture app’s database. Google has only made the museum selfie match feature available in the US officially, however, that has not stopped users from accessing it in South Africa and other countries.
How to use Google museum app’s selfie match feature in South Africa
Anyone can download and use the Google Arts & Culture app, however, the museum selfie match feature is currently region locked to US and not available in South Africa and other countries. With the use of a VPN service, you are allowed to access to the selfie matching feature in South Africa.
Here is how you can go about doing that…
- Start by downloading the Google Arts & Culture from Google Play Store or App Store. Do not open the app before the next step.
- Now, download a VPN – we recommend the Opera VPN app, available from the Play Store or App Store due to its reliability and ease to use. Once installed, open the Opera VPN app. Click on ‘Switch location’ under the Device Location tab, and select United States from the list.
- Once the location is changed, open the Google Arts & Culture app. Scroll down till a card appears titled “Is your portrait in a museum?” Click on Get Started and then select I Accept.
- The app will then ask for permission to access your front camera. Align your face in the provided frame, which will prompt the app to click a photo. The database and pattern recognition software now come into play, with the app scanning for similar portraits. Once done, it will display the four best matched options to choose from.
The Google app also displays the percentage of match for each image. Additionally, the Google Arts & Culture app will reveal the name of the selected portraits along with the museum it belongs to.
Something also worth noting is that the Google Arts & Culture app makes use of pattern recognition to recognise face patterns and understand characteristics of different faces. The app looks for properties such as beards, glasses etc to select relevant portraits from its database.
