Sam Marvit has been Moroccan and Polish his entire life. However, yesterday, for just a few minutes, he was instantly transformed into a person of White, Asian, Hispanic, Indian and Middle Eastern descent.

The Human Race Machine, a device that captures the image of a person's face, analyzes its features, and then morphs it into six different races, will be available all week to curious students as part of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day celebration.

"It's very interesting," Marvit (senior-mathematics) said after seeing the images. "I'm not terribly surprised. I'm mixed for the most part, so a lot of the images looked very similar to my own face."

That is the very message the Race Relations Project, the group sponsoring and operating the machine, is trying to get across.

"In regards to genetic make-up, the percentage that accounts for racial features is actually very small," Tamaira Quezada (graduate-industrial relations and human resources), a member of the Race Relations Project, said.

Artist Nancy Burson, creator of the machine, recognized the startling resemblance between the facial features of different races. Wanting to show the public how similar they are, she took hundreds of photographs of people from the six races and created a digital template into which faces are transformed by the machine.

Students interested in seeing what they would look like as a different race sit in front of the device and line their eyes up with designated points on the computer screen. A photo is snapped and students then indicate the location of their forehead, chin, nose, eyes and mouth with a joystick. Within seconds, their face is transformed to correlate with the general features of any race they choose.

"It's a good way for people to have fun and learn at the same time," said Merin Thomas (graduate- international development), another member of the Race Relations Project. "Hopefully people will see that there aren't too many differences between races."

As stirring quotes such as "beneath the skin we are all very similar" and "there is no gene for race" flashed across the screen behind him, Mike Doss (senior-film history) noted that the most interesting part of his experience was his ability to recognize his own similarity with close friends of different backgrounds.

"I was most surprised to see that the Asian version of me looked a lot like my friend from back home," he said.

Priyanka Basak (sophomore-premedicine) also noted how surprising the resemblance among the different images was.

"It's certainly eye-opening," she said. "It gives you a different way to look at racial issues. Normally people think of race as something that divides."

The Eberly College of Science and the office of the vice provost for educational equity are also sponsoring the project, which continues daily from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. until Friday on the first floor of the HUB-Robeson Center.