Immigration campaigns are often only focused on acceptance of foreigners in our society asking locals to welcome immigrants. But they often don´t give the opportunity for a real dialogue between both parties.

We created a website based on face-recognition technology where all individual faces were morphed into a collective identity – and turned integration into a positive interactive experience. Swiss citizens and immigrants now had the opportunity to show the true face of Zurich. One that is changing all the time.

On the Microsite people could discover an ever changing face of Zurich based on uploaded photos of participants. Around 70 points from every face were detected, like eyes, nose, lips, corner of the mouth, chin, cheekbones and many more, to morph all portraits into the face of Zurich.

Components were scripts that automatically detected faces and located face points. The software then aligned faces by resizing, centering and cropping to the given size. Given all the images and its face points, the images got warped into all the others. Face points got triangulated to transform all triangles with bilinear interpolation. Finally all pictures got morphed together in real time and created an ever changing average face from all participants.

The platform is based on a software for creating average faces and got developed further with scripts from face-recognition software, combined with a real time morphing tool.

The final outcome of the campaign was a female and male face from all participants. We used both faces to boost the campaign again and showed them on billboards to promote a multi cultural Zurich.

With this campaign every citizen, no matter if immigrant or local, realized that we all are an important part of the society and the regions identity.

The campaign got free media coverage in national newspapers. Daily interviews from participants were published over one month and we reached around 200´000 readers every day. The face morphing and the permanently changing identity of Zurich fascinated users and generated enormous buzz.

What started as a low budget awareness campaign for around 50k Swiss Francs resulted in a dialogue campaign with big media coverage and high involvement worth around 1.5 Mio Swiss Francs.