The distance between your facial features can betray your age, according to the creator of a kiosk at this year's Book Fair which is said to be able to make reading recommendations based on such information.
The booth goes a step further than one introduced at last year's fair, which offered recommendations based on answers to questions keyed in by users.
The Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute (ASTRI), which built the device, says it can determine gender and age with 85 per cent reliability, and make recommendations based on this.
It uses a database of more than 10,000 Asian faces, with each face assigned about 20 points and the distances between them measured and stored.
'For a 40-year-old woman, her eyes will start to tilt downwards. It will shorten the distance between her eye and some other points,' the institute's manager of material and packaging technologies, Crystal Fok Lo-ming, said, adding that 'it is important to have a database ... of Asian faces, as their features are remarkably different from Westerners.'
The institute also included a higher number of younger people in its database as the fair, which will run from July 18 to 24 at the Convention and Exhibition Centre, is frequented by children and teenagers. Customers will be able to have a trial read of their recommended books and save selected pages to make a tailor-made electronic book of their own.