Put a Beard On It!

Finally the answer to the question every beardsman has on his mind … “What would it be like if everyone had a beard?” I reached out to David Fankhauser and Benjamin Grössing, founders of Wurstify, to find out a little more about their vision for Wurstify, the greatest invention for bored, web-browsing beard lovers since, well, ever. Here’s what I found out:

What is Wurstify?

Wurstify is a browser extension which adds beards to all faces on the Internet while you are surfing. It’s an entirely reinvented web experience, allowing you to have exclusively bearded friends on Facebook or reading news from politicians and hollywood stars radiating beardy wisdom with everything they say. It works on all websites.

Why beards?

We believe that everything is more awesome if you put a beard on it. In the case of Wurstify it’s a Wurst Beard – inspired by Conchita Wurst, the winner of the Eurovision Song Content 2014. Conchita is a great performer, but what made her stand out against the competition was that she had put a beard on a face, at which people would not have expected one. Wurstify does the same thing with all images on the Internet.

How did you come up with the idea and how long did it take?

Thinking back, we have suffered from the lack of beards on the Internet for many, many years. While there are certainly places with a higher beards-per-face ratio, such as Instagram or the Facebook fan page of ZZ Top, most of it clearly lacks people with facial hair. It was in the fall of last year when we decided to do something against that.

We are both studying computer science, so it was obvious that we would develop a software to solve our problem. We tried out several algorithms and went with the one delivering the best results. It was awesome to see that it would actually work, but that real aha moment came when we put that thing on the internet and packaged it in a browser extension. Finally, Wurst Beards all over the place!

That was a few weeks ago and since then we have further polished the face detection and beard mapping to make it look even more realistic on even more faces.

Is the Wurstify team bearded?

Yes, but only until you disable Wurstify.

Are there plans to expand the facial hair options?

Adding more customization options is definitely on our radar. There have been requests to change the color or the overall look of the beard – and we can see how this would add even more value to the extension. There are also other ideas, such as adding support for more browsers or WurstWiFi, a WiFi access point with built-in wurstification.

We are receiving lots of feedback and are very happy about the positive response from users of Wurstify. Up to now we are collecting ideas and options and have not yet decided what will be done first and how to prioritize stuff. But there are definitely great things to come!

How can our readers get Wurstify?

Check out Wurstify on Twitter!

Wurstify is available exclusively for Google Chrome.