FOUND PERSONS

August 30, 2017 3:46 PM

Have
you
seen
us
?
RENDER SEARCH

Some time in 2010 I discovered a company selling scenery for 3D visualisations online. Their stock included sets of trees, foliage, street furniture – and people. Hundreds of them: Urban People, Business People, People on the Weekend, Children, People in Perspective – the latter photographed from above, for the most spectacular views. Among their collections I recognised faces I had seen elsewhere: sitting patiently in Heathrow’s soon-to-be-completed Terminal 2; gazing down from the High Line in New York next to an angular, unbuilt new Whitney Museum; exploring the upper stories of London’s shimmering, dream-shattering Shard. The company ran a zombie website: still online, and apparently doing business, its wares had long since escaped onto the Internet, migrating across torrent sites and hobbyist servers, appearing in Google Image searches, to end up on the hard drives of every student architect, nascent practice, and day-dreaming visualisation artist around the world. Everyone I asked recognised them; none could tell me where they were from.

posted by the man of twists and turns (5 comments total)

Omg it's like someone took one of my shower thoughts and made a website out of it.

I frequently think about this, and aloud to friends (outside of showers) about how many random photos we as people and individuals have been in as background, props, etc. And if we would ever know.

Like if those fictional heaven portrayal where when you die in the afterlife you could ask a angel/demon/administrator anything about your life really exists, one of my questions would be exactly that.
posted by numaner at 4:10 PM on August 30, 2017 [2 favorites]

Interesting fact: the architecture slang for these render ghosts is "scalies"
Even more interesting fact: if you do a google image search for "scalies" without adding "architecture," you get something very different
posted by theodolite at 4:48 PM on August 30, 2017 [8 favorites]

well, you don't say
posted by numaner at 4:52 PM on August 30, 2017

Interesting fact: the architecture slang for these render ghosts is "scalies"
Even more interesting fact: if you do a google image search for "scalies" without adding "architecture," you get something very different

All of us should know inadequate criteria in Google Image Search will send us horrors. Horrors beyond imagining.
posted by Samizdata at 11:25 PM on August 30, 2017 [1 favorite]

MetaFilter: Omg it's like someone took one of my shower thoughts and made a website out of it.
posted by Foosnark at 6:05 AM on September 1, 2017