Gen Mo brothers in arms – our very own Fletcher Woolard and Movember Australia Country Director, Jeremy Macvean.
By Carrie Bengston
For us, Movember isn’t just about blokes growing facial hair and raising funds for men’s health – it’s a chance to collect data and muck around with technology.
Computer fluid dynamicist Fletcher Woolard is more used to animating geophysical flows like tsunamis and landslides. But this month, he thought he’d try something a little different – animating mo growth.
Using his skills in computer simulation, he photographed day by day, millimetre by millimetre, follicle by follicle how his mo was growing – and turned it into a cool time lapse video.
In just four seconds, you can see Fletcher’s facial hair growing at around 400,000 times the normal speed.
Unfortunately his efforts were still a long way off Ram Singh Chauhan, who has spent over thirty years crafting an impressive 4.29 metre long moustache. But hey, it’s not bad for less than a month’s growth.
Perhaps not surprisingly, this isn’t our first attempt at capturing hair growth data.
Even our resident alien, Max, is getting involved. Check out his mo-gress.
Back in 2008, our image analysis team developed software to count and measure hair regrowth. It was designed to test the effectiveness of hair removal products more accurately – which is traditionally a manual (and pretty boring) process.
The software took digital images from a specifically designed scanner pressed on to the skin, and used smart algorithms to automatically look for the hairs. Despite initial interest from several hair replacement studios, it sadly never made it to product stage
But all is not lost. Luckily in today’s world of mobile wireless technology, there’s an app for that – the mo tracker.
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For more information or to get involved in Movember, head to Movember Australia.
