Microsoft introduced $4, a hilarious new website to swap and combine faces, at today's Microsoft Build 2016 developer conference. It's the $4 taken to its most hilarious inevitable conclusion.
It's still showing a "Coming Soon" message, with the promise that it'll go up very soon. But I got to play with it on the Microsoft Build show floor before the official announcement.
Project Murphy is billed as "the robot with imagination." With a keyboard or your microphone, you can ask it to imagine the combination of two things, and it'll do its best to answer in the form of a robotically-made composite image, sourced from Bing Image Search.
Best of all, $4 works on real people, with your phone or PC's camera.
Here's its response to "What if I were a superhero," starring me:
Project Murphy
In an attempt to stump Project Murphy, I also asked "What if I were $4," Disney Channel international star:
Project Murphy
Fetching.
It quickly becomes addictive, trying to find new and ever-funnier monstrosities to have Project Murphy create for you. Here's "What if Donald Trump were Hillary Clinton?" And, uh, apologies in advance:
Project Murphy
Or "What if Bill Gates were Steve Jobs?"
Project Murphy
It can even go a little esoteric with stuff like "What if Donald Trump were on Mount Rushmore?"
Project Murphy
Behind the scenes, Microsoft is using its cognitive services for image recognition and language comprehension to provide ever-smarter responses. It's actually a Skype bot under the hood.
In a kind of cool but kind of creepy move, Project Murphy actually uses the look on your face when you see the result to judge if it did a good job or not so it can improve. The mood of the little robot depends on your reaction.
This is $4, who were tasked by Satya Nadella himself with making something even cooler for the 2016 conference. Judging from how much fun I had in just twenty minutes of tooling around with Project Murphy, it looks like they've succeeded.