Can't find Wally? AI to the rescue...

If you’ve ever been driven to insanity by not being able to find Wally (Waldo in the US), or if you love to ruin the fun of the game - there’s an AI-powered robot for you. Enter the aptly named “There’s Wally”…

The creative design agency “Redpepper” have made an AI-powered robot that can find Wally in 4.45 seconds: especially useful, according to the agency themselves, if you want to usurp a five year old in a Where’s Wally contest.

The robot consists of a Raspberry Pi 3B connected to a Vision camera kit for facial recognition and a metal robotic arm (the enthrallingly named uArm Swift Pro). This arm is connected to a novelty silicon rubber hand which points out Wally on the page - thereby also pointing out AI’s triumphant victory over humanity in the key battleground of Where’s Wally competitions.

But how does it work?

First, the creator - Matt Reed - created a database of around 130 pictures of Wally using Google Image’s image search. Then, he used Google’s AutoML Vision service to train AI on photos of Wally (you can train AI using AutoML too - as its drag and drop functionality means you don’t need prior coding knowledge). This technology is the same as what enables Google Photos to recognise faces from photographs. Next, showtime… The camera takes dozens of high-resolution pictures of each ‘target’ page in the Where’s Wally book and these images get fed into an AI algorithm. The algorithm analyses the photos and when it finds a face it is 95% or more confident in of being Wally, the robotic arm (controlled via Python’s PyArm library) moves the silicon hand to reveal Wally - et voila!

Admittedly, AI-powered robots to serve the need of finding Wally is a bit of a niche, but the technology used to create this robot does have wider implications - apart from possibly ostracising you from game night for “ruining the game”. There’s Wally acts as testament to the capability of AI facial recognition software - it’s evident how quickly AI algorithms can be used to pick a face out from the crowd. Reed actually used the technology for this in a more consequential creation named “FaceDeals”. FaceDeals is a facial recognition system that essentially uses one’s face as a barcode - scanning you in when you enter a location like a supermarket. FaceDeals then checks you into that location on FaceBook before sending you a unique discount code via text based off of your individual preferences (adjudged by FaceBook). For example, if your FaceBook preferences were geared towards your undying love for mozzarella, then when entering a cheese shop, you’d likely receive a discount code for mozzarella cheese.

Thus, although the technology in There’s Wally is quite novel and at first glance, inconsequential, the facial recognition software powering the robot has serious implications for the future - both in terms of safety and ethics.

Thumbnail GIF by Redpepper