Baby, it's you—in 34 years

After taking a gander at myself through the eyes of this on-the-Web aging software, I've gotta say—I'm glad I don't smoke.

These freaky-enough-to-scare-the-kids photos are courtesy of Age-Me.com, a site that uses facial age progression technology (dubbed "April") to give you a peek at your beautiful self—decades into the future.

Fair warning before you get too excited: The site isn't free. In fact, it costs a cool $20 for a total of four age progressions. Kinda pricey, if you ask me—luckily, Yahoo! pays me to try stuff like this, so I went ahead and plunked down my twenty bucks.

Anyway, that picture on the left is the projected me at age 72, assuming I've been eating my vegetables and generally behaving myself. The snapshot on the right? That's me after countless packs of cigarettes and too many Big Macs. (Looks like my hair made out OK, though.)

The software, which made its debut on the Web a few months ago, creates the wrinkly, bloaty images based on images of about 7,000 people "of all ages, ethnicities and lifestyle habits," according to April developer Emega Imaging.

The setup is pretty simple: You just take a snapshot of yourself (in color, in front of a plain background, no smiling allowed), upload it to the service, and the select a few "lifestyle" factors, such as smoking, exposure to the sun, and how much weight you plan on gaining in the coming decades.

Once April is done processing your picture, you just click the "play" button to watch yourself get old and gray (all the way up to 72); there's also a slider that you can drag back and forth.

The April software is slated to power a mirror that takes your snapshot and displays how you'll look in six months—the perfect incentive for cutting down on those cupcakes.

Don't look for the so-called "persuasive mirror" at Wal-Mart anytime soon however; according to ABC News.com, it's still undergoing testing and will probably end up in hospitals rather than your bathroom (initially, at least).

Related:
A Look Into the Future -- and Sometimes It Ain't Pretty [ABC News.com]