Glasses Equipped with Facial Recognition Are in Our Future
Most discussions of facial recognition technology contemplate a world in which people walk the streets and drive the roads under the watchful eyes of government surveillance cameras. Those cameras will tag and track those who fail to hide their features, recording their movements for future reference.
But what if one day facial recognition tech becomes so cheap and portable that it can be built into wearable devices? You wouldn’t know if somebody calling your name at a bar was an old friend or a con artist working a scam after linking your face to searchable online personal information. That day is now, courtesy of two Harvard University undergrads.
These Glasses Can See Into Your Life
Creators AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, two Harvard students with undoubtedly impressive careers ahead of them, introduced what they call I-XRAY with a video on Instagram (also on X) of the two taking turns walking around Harvard’s campus and the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts. They shared information drawn from the internet about people they meet, based on identification by facial features. In two cases, the subjects aren’t aware of the experiment and the inventors engage them in casual conversation as if they were past acquaintances.
“To use it, you just put the glasses on, then as you walk by people the glasses will detect when somebody’s face is in frame,” Ardayfio says in a voice-over. “This photo is used to analyze them, and after a few seconds their personal information pops up on your phone.”
“The information our tool collects from just a photo of your face is staggering,” he adds.
The tool is partially a pairing of hacked Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and the PimEyes face search engine among what the duo describe as “five established technologies.” The glasses have built-in cameras, speakers, microphones, and AI capability, and link with phones via Bluetooth. They also give you a classic Buddy Holly look, if you’re style-conscious. The glasses can live-stream directly to Instagram and Facebook, which is important for facial-recognition use.
“We stream the video from the glasses straight to Instagram and have a computer program monitor the stream,” details Nguyen. “We use AI to detect when we’re looking at someone’s face, then we scour the internet to find more pictures of that person. Finally, we use data sources like online articles and voter registration databases to figure out their name, phone number, home address, and relatives’ names and it’s all fed back to an app we wrote on our phone.”
Combining Creativity With Off-the-Shelf Technology
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Article from Reason.com
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