VI means visual identification, it's a socionics term for telling a type by looking at a person, sometimes by looking at multiple photos.
cues such as whether and how your smile may be asymmetric, whether one of your eyes may be more relaxed ... you rarely get all cues in a single photo, single natural expression. but if you do a google image search for a celebrity and you have 10 or 20 pictures, it's enough. some people claim, that type can only be seen in animation, in video, but animation is seen in photos as well, in typical expressions but also in how it conditions wrinkles and such. type is seen in the way muscles operate, not in the shape of the skull. muscles are operated by the brain, it should not be hard to believe, that this is possible. facial expressions are designed to be an expression of interiority, everyone knows this. if interiority has types, so has expression. muscles can also shape skull shape in minor ways, long term. maybe by pressure or maybe because they are channels of nutrients. but this is hardly useful for reading a type.
