New Jersey Dating App Only Cares About Your Looks

NEWARK, NJ — It’s called “love at first sight” for a reason.

That’s the underlying concept that inspired a group of computer science grad students at the Newark-based New Jersey Institute of Technology to create FaceDate, a mobile dating app that matches people on two criteria: the attractiveness of their faces and their location.

Here’s how the in-development app works:

Users upload a photo of themselves and provide some basic information, including birthdate, gender and a brief bio. Next, romance-seekers are asked to upload a set of headshot photos of people that they find “attractive.” FaceDate then stores the images in a database and uses a facial recognition algorithm to find potential matches from the app’s pool of users. Successful matches are notified and allowed to contact each other via a “chat with match” tool.

Users can also narrow down their searches by location, developers say.

But other than that simple requirement, FaceDate doesn’t care about your charming personality or good sense of humor… it’s all about your looks.

While some might criticize the app as a superficial way to go looking for a romantic partner, FaceDate’s developers say that there’s nothing necessarily bad about getting excited about love at first sight.

“Appearance is generally the essential characteristic that connects people at the beginning of a relationship,” said Cristian Borcea, professor and chair of the NJIT computer science department, who offered project guidance to student developers Hillol Debnath, Nafize Paiker, Jianchen Shan and Pradyumna Neog.

Read more about Borcea’s work at NJIT here.

According to a NJIT news release, the Android-based FaceDate is currently in the prototype phase on Moitree, a middleware for cloud-assisted mobile distributed apps and geared toward 18 to 30-year-old users.

The app’s developers applied for a patent last year and plan to roll out the first phase of FaceDate exclusively to NJIT students in the coming months, with the hope of securing funding for further development and implementation on iOS.

Photo: YouTube screenshot, NJIT

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