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Hulu 'Face Match' feature attaches an actor's entire history to their mug
It seems like facial recognition is popping up everywhere these days, and now it's even on Hulu. We last checked in with Hulu Labs when it launched a ten-foot UI for PC viewers, and now it's back putting clickable squares on every actor's face that immediately pull up their background info, as seen above. So far, the feature is only set up for a few episodes of Glee, The Office, Wilfred, Modern Family and Lost, and it's completely optional, look for a newer show and punch the settings button to turn it on. It pulls info from Wikipedia, lists some of the actor's biggest roles and even links to Facebook and Twitter accounts in some cases. While its easy to use, on a PC it feels a bit like overkill (with IMDB and Google always a click away how much time are we saving?) but it worked effectively in the episode of The Office we watched -- US residents can take a peek at it embedded after the break.
Hulu Desktop app puts a remote control friendly face on for Macs & PCs
Apparently devoting developers to something other than the great boxee arms race of 2009, Hulu today took the wraps off of its Hulu Labs project, with several "experimental projects" giving a different spin to the TV show & movie-streaming site. None of them are bigger than the Hulu Desktop app, a "lean back" interface (what, they heard ten-foot was already taken?) that unleashes Hulu's Flash video from the browser and also supports Mac & Microsoft compatible six button remotes -- which makes their unwillingness/inability to continue boxee access or offer an official Media Center plugin even more confusing. Even those without HTPC's to try that out on, there is a Video Panel Designer offering customized embeddable widgets for website owners, a Recommendations section based on what you've already watched and a new Time-Based Browsing option to order programs by when they originally aired. Give them a try and let us know if this makes you forget about all the other ways that were already available (boxee, PlayOn, Secondrun.tv, Understudy, ReQuest, XBMC & others) to get Hulu on your HDTV.
