Prof Wiseman teamed with psychologist Rob Jenkins (University of Glasgow) and employed a technique known as prototyping to discover exactly how Ian Fleming envisaged his world famous hero.

Most people are poor at describing a face that they have in their mind, but can easily pick out photographs of faces that resemble the image in their mind’s eye.  Previous research has shown that blending together several pictures of a person's face creates a highly accurate image of that person. We used the same technique has been to create a photograph of a fictional character.

In 1961, Fleming listed several actors that he thought had the right facial characteristics to play Bond.  Jenkins tracked down images of these actors and used sophisticated software to blend them into a single composite image.
 
"The image allows us to turn back the hands of time, go inside Fleming¹s head and see how he envisioned Bond when he was writing his novels" commented Jenkins.

"The image shows a clean-cut, classic looking face which is far more Connery than Craig" noted Wiseman, "Perhaps this is another way of resolving the question of who is the best Bond".

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