Google Glass App Can Identify Your Friends by Clothing
This Glass app can recognize people by the clothes they're wearing.
NewScientist reports that a developer from the University of South Carolina (Columbia) has created an app for Google Glass called Insight. Partially funded by Google, it was revealed last week during the HotMobile technology conference in Jekyll Island, Georgia, and promised to identify individuals based on the clothes they wear.
According to the report, developer Srihari Nelakuditi joined forces with Romit Roy Choudhury and colleagues at Duke University to develop a recognition system based on a "fashion fingerprint" of a person's outfit. This fingerprint includes jewelry, badges and glasses in addition to the person's favorite shoes or shirt.
To create the fingerprint, a smartphone app is used to acquire a series of photos of the user as they surf the Internet, read email and whatnot. The app then takes those images and saves the spatial distribution of colors, textures and patterns of the subject's clothes into a file called a "spatiogram". This data supposedly makes it easier to identify someone even at odd viewing angles or from long distances.
Of course, this fingerprint is likely a one-time deal, as a subject will change clothes and thus need a new fingerprint. That should please privacy advocates who are already steaming over the camera mounted in Google's Glass specs. However that doesn't mean the system couldn't be altered later to "thumbprint" accessories a person typically wears like combos of a certain watch, a pair of shoes and glasses.
Early tests of the app proved quite successful, as a team of 15 volunteers were able to correctly identify people 93-percent of the time, even when the subjects had their backs facing the Glass-based user. Matching data from the phone's motion sensor with the motion in the Glass field of view will supposedly boost accuracy, the report said.
NewScientist believes this tech could help individuals suffering with "face blindness", a neurological disorder that makes it impossible to recognize others. The app could tell the affected user the names of friends nearby… at least while they wear a certain set of clothes, that is.
I mean can anyone name a "legit" use for this ?
Have you ever been in a situation where you couldn't quite recall what a given person's name was ?
With this thing - that would hardly be an issue.
Just because people should be able to do math in their mind and on paper doesn't make calculators useless... Just because people usually remember others, it doesn't mean they shouldn't be spared the awkwardness when they don't.
surveilance of the population... get with the program bro.
If you don't know me well enough to remember my name, please just ask it.
Google Glass: "Wh*re"
this type of attitude is the reason Id rather not have to ask.
sorry, it seems that the wrong quote was inserted...
now, THIS type of attitude is the reason Id rather not have to ask.
can you say "awkward"?... I need those glasses more than I thought!
Remember the Futurama where Fry used the X-Ray specs to win a contest?
This has to be the dumbest "invention" of recent times. Why would I want a device to identify friends that's what I have two eyes and a brain for. This is just pointless plain and simple. What a waste of money to the people that sponser these scientist they must be thrilled knowing thier money is going to such pointless research.
Now that I would pay for!
Actually the first thing I thought of when I read the title and saw the picture was the episode "Revenge of the killer app." where they stick "eye" phones in peoples eyes.