rigorousintuition.ca

07 March 2013 by Paul Marks
Magazine issue 2907. Subscribe and save

CAN'T find a face in the crowd? Not to worry, a human recognition system can spot people for you – even when their faces aren't visible. Designed for Google's forthcoming Glass headset, it recognises people by the clothes they are wearing. Their name is then overlaid on the headset's video.

The system, called InSight, is part-funded by Google and was unveiled at the HotMobile technology conference in Jekyll Island, Georgia, last week. It aims to help users find their friends and be spotted themselves in busy places like shopping centres, sports stadia and airports. Face recognition systems cannot be used for this, says InSight developer Srihari Nelakuditi at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, because it is unlikely someone in a crowd will be looking straight at a headset's camera.

So Nelakuditi joined forces with Romit Roy Choudhury and colleagues at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, to develop a recognition system based on a "fashion fingerprint" of a person's outfit, from their clothes to their jewellery, badges and glasses.

This fingerprint is constructed by a smartphone app which snaps a series of photos of the user as they read web pages, emails or tweets. It then creates a file – called a spatiogram – that captures the spatial distribution of colours, textures and patterns (vertical or horizontal stripes, say) of the clothes they are wearing. This combination of colour, texture and pattern analysis makes someone easier to identify at odd viewing angles or over long distances.

Usefully, in terms of protecting people's privacy, the fingerprint changes every time you change your clothes, so you can be anonymous again whenever you wish.

"A person's visual fingerprint is only temporary, say for a day or an evening," says Nelakuditi.

In early tests using 15 volunteers, the team identified people 93 per cent of the time, even when they had their backs to the headset user. Matching data from the phone's motion sensor with motion in the Glass field of view will boost accuracy.

"There are a lot of personal characteristics that make us unique," says Mark Nixon, a biometrics specialist at the University of Southampton, UK. "Clothing and movement are highly related to gait – and gait has been shown to be unique."

The system could be used by someone who wants to attract attention to themselves and their CV at a job fair, or outside a stadium where they are selling a spare ticket, the team says.

It could perhaps even help people with a condition known as face blindness – a neurological disorder that makes it impossible to recognise others – by telling them the names of friends nearby.

Mann finds that due to his extensive use of the device that going without it can cause him to feel "nauseous, unsteady, naked" when he removes it.

justdrew wrote:

1996

The key experiential question of Google Glass isn’t what it’s like to wear them, it’s what it’s like to be around someone else who’s wearing them. I’ll give an easy example. Your one-on-one conversation with someone wearing Google Glass is likely to be annoying, because you’ll suspect that you don’t have their undivided attention. And you can’t comfortably ask them to take the glasses off (especially when, inevitably, the device is integrated into prescription lenses). Finally – here’s where the problems really start – you don’t know if they’re taking a video of you.

Now pretend you don’t know a single person who wears Google Glass… and take a walk outside. Anywhere you go in public – any store, any sidewalk, any bus or subway – you’re liable to be recorded: audio and video. Fifty people on the bus might be Glassless, but if a single person wearing Glass gets on, you – and all 49 other passengers – could be recorded. Not just for a temporary throwaway video buffer, like a security camera, but recorded, stored permanently, and shared to the world.

Now, I know the response: “I’m recorded by security cameras all day, it doesn’t bother me, what’s the difference?” Hear me out – I’m not done. What makes Glass so unique is that it’s a Google project. And Google has the capacity to combine Glass with other technologies it owns.

First, take the video feeds from every Google Glass headset, worn by users worldwide. Regardless of whether video is only recorded temporarily, as in the first version of Glass, or always-on, as is certainly possible in future versions, the video all streams into Google’s own cloud of servers. Now add in facial recognition and the identity database that Google is building within Google Plus (with an emphasis on people’s accurate, real-world names): Google’s servers can process video files, at their leisure, to attempt identification on every person appearing in every video. And if Google Plus doesn’t sound like much, note that Mark Zuckerberg has already pledged that Facebook will develop apps for Glass.

Finally, consider the speech-to-text software that Google already employs, both in its servers and on the Glass devices themselves. Any audio in a video could, technically speaking, be converted to text, tagged to the individual who spoke it, and made fully searchable within Google’s search index.

Now our stage is set: not for what will happen, necessarily, but what I just want to point out could technically happen, by combining tools already available within Google.

Let’s return to the bus ride. It’s not a stretch to imagine that you could immediately be identified by that Google Glass user who gets on the bus and turns the camera toward you. Anything you say within earshot could be recorded, associated with the text, and tagged to your online identity. And stored in Google’s search index. Permanently.

I’m still not done.

The really interesting aspect is that all of the indexing, tagging, and storage could happen without the Google Glass user even requesting it. Any video taken by any Google Glass, anywhere, is likely to be stored on Google servers, where any post-processing (facial recognition, speech-to-text, etc.) could happen at the later request of Google, or any other corporate or governmental body, at any point in the future.

Remember when people were kind of creeped out by that car Google drove around to take pictures of your house? Most people got over it, because they got a nice StreetView feature in Google Maps as a result.

Google Glass is like one camera car for each of the thousands, possibly millions, of people who will wear the device – every single day, everywhere they go – on sidewalks, into restaurants, up elevators, around your office, into your home. From now on, starting today, anywhere you go within range of a Google Glass device, everything you do could be recorded and uploaded to Google’s cloud, and stored there for the rest of your life. You won’t know if you’re being recorded or not; and even if you do, you’ll have no way to stop it.

And that, my friends, is the experience that Google Glass creates. That is the experience we should be thinking about. The most important Google Glass experience is not the user experience – it’s the experience of everyone else. The experience of being a citizen, in public, is about to change.

Just think: if a million Google Glasses go out into the world and start storing audio and video of the world around them, the scope of Google search suddenly gets much, much bigger, and that search index will include you. Let me paint a picture. Ten years from now, someone, some company, or some organization, takes an interest in you, wants to know if you’ve ever said anything they consider offensive, or threatening, or just includes a mention of a certain word or phrase they find interesting. A single search query within Google’s cloud – whether initiated by a publicly available search, or a federal subpoena, or anything in between – will instantly bring up documentation of every word you’ve ever spoken within earshot of a Google Glass device.

This is the discussion we should have about Google Glass. The tech community, by all rights, should be leading this discussion. Yet most techies today are still chattering about whether they’ll look cool wearing the device.

Oh, and as for that physical design problem. If Google Glass does well enough in its initial launch to survive to subsequent versions, forget Warby Parker. The next company Google will call is Bausch & Lomb. Why wear bulky glasses when the entire device fits into a contact lens? And that, of course, would be the ultimate expression of the Google Glass idea: a digital world that is even more difficult to turn off, once it’s implanted directly into the user’s body. At that point you’ll not even know who might be recording you. There will be no opting out.

Microsoft wants to patent 'life streaming,' turn your whole life into Jersey Shore
By Daniel Cooper posted Aug 23rd, 2012 at 1:58 PM
Imagine a reality TV show that's starring you, recorded by you and directed by Microsoft? That's the principle behind its most recently disclosed patent application, dreaming up a method to transmit data from a "life recorder" to a target device for safe keeping. The company pictures you using your smartphone (or other device -- just a shame the ideal one is Google's) to document your life, before it automatically catalogs, tags and uploads it to elsewhere for friends and family to enjoy. We're not sure if we want our friends from the Hockey Club seeing us freak out at Kelly Clarkson gigs, but hopefully there's an off switch.

IanEye wrote:

justdrew wrote:

1996

i used to see this guy on the red line all the time.

82_28 wrote:I remember as a kid listening to thrash music with friends having discussions about "how is the music going to get more FAST?" Because that was the deal. In the late 80s and early 90s if you were into that kind of shit, you noticed a hella increase in the speed of the drums. Kinda l guess, I just noticed the limit, while it seemed like everybody else thought shit would get faster and faster. I didn't see how it could. But everyone believed it would. Seems we just switched formats as to speed.

Seattle drinking den bans Google Glass geeks

A Seattle bar has issued a preemptive ban of Google Glass to preserve the privacy of its tipplers.

The 5 Point Cafe in Seattle announced plans to suppress the futuristic devices on its Facebook page this week, and didn't mince words.

"The 5 Point is the first Seattle business to ban in advance Google Glasses," the bar wrote. "And ass kickings will be encouraged for violators."

Google Glasses are not yet widely available, though Google is doling out some of the Chocolate Factory goggles to vainglorious creative social media users as part of a breathless neo-utopian marketing campaign.

These Google-enabled cyborgs will want to steer clear of the Seattle watering hole, or risk violent and abrupt inertial-transference disciplinary measures to their derrieres.

The 5 Point Cafe made the decision to ban Google-eyed punters out of respect for the privacy of its clientele.

"You have to understand the culture of The 5 Point which is a sometimes seedy, maybe notorious place and I think people want to go there and be not known," 5 Point owner Dave Meinert tells myNorthwest.

If you're live-streaming this glyph, don't drop by the 5 Point.

"We don't let people film other people or take photos unwanted of other people in the bar because it's kind of a private place people go."

Meinert's anti-Glass stance has struck a chord with the bar's drinking clientele, with many of them speaking up in favor of the ban.

"I plan on carrying flat black spray paint cans for folks who want to google-glass record me without permission," one privacy-conscious tippler wrote... on Facebook.