Google Arts and Culture's viral selfie feature comes to India

A recent update to Google's art and culture platform added a new feature, "an experiment that matches user selfie with art from the collections of museums available on the platform".

The feature, which went viral globally last week, was rolled out today in the country.

Using computer vision technology, the application matches a user's selfie with a work of art from its wide database.

With this new feature users can take a selfie, upload it, and the app using computer vision technology will automatically match it with a work of classical art from one of the several art museums worldwide," the company said in a statement.

While the application tries to find the nearest match, it shows an estimated percentage of visual similarity between the face and the artwork.

"At Google Arts & Culture, our software engineers are always experimenting with new and creative ways to connect you with art and culture. That's how this selfie feature came about, too," a Google spokesperson said.

Since its first roll-out, people have used the feature by taking over 30 million selfies.

"We created an experiment that matches the selfie with art from the collections of museums on Google Arts & Culture — and over the past few days, people have taken more than 30 million selfies. Looking at the success in the US, we are excited to roll this feature to other countries, including India," the spokesperson said.

Through the new feature, the application connects users to more than 6,000 exhibitions, from more than 1,500 museum partners across 70 countries.

The virtual art platform hosts millions of artifacts and pieces of art, ranging from prehistory to the contemporary, shared by museums across the world.