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Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses

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Re: Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses

#111
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry that you have to deal with this condition. What method do you use currently to help with recognising them?

Usually you talk to them and then you remember who they are or where you know them from. It's not like you can't tell your wife apart from your orthodontist.

I recently learned that I have some level of face-blindness (I took the CFMT online and scored 43).

It's something I've had my whole life but only recently realized wasn't "normal". It's not like I can't recognize people at all, but rather that faces aren't very distinctive to me compared to other identifying characteristics (such as hair color/style/length, clothing, skin tone, height, voice, gait, mannerisms, etc.) It takes me a while to learn to distinguish everyone in a group of people (especially people who are similar along all of those attributes), but once I know someone well I will usually recognize them without problems.

The only real issues are when someone changes their appearance (e.g. getting glasses or shaving a beard), or when I run into someone in an unexpected context (like randomly meeting someone I know on the street). A few months ago I ran into my cousin at an event in another city, and didn't recognize her until after 20 or 30 seconds of conversation.

It's also not usually too hard to mask. I realized I have a subconscious habit of never greeting people by name because I'm always afraid of getting it wrong, and it's easy enough to bluff through "oh hi, how are you, good to see you, what have you been up to" pleasantries until I figure out who I'm talking to. The most awkward situations are when I'm unsure whether or not I know someone and have to risk either mistaking a stranger for a friend, or accidentally ignoring/reintroducing myself to an acquaintance. Also, starting a new TV show sucks.

Now that I know it's an actual condition with a name, I'm not sure yet whether it makes things better or worse if I try to explain it to people to excuse my mistakes.

If any other face blind people have useful tips or experiences, I'm all ears :)

Re: Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses

#112

Start up idea: Ordinary glass (as in spectacles) frames that have a near IR LED on the bridge and on the side. PWM to be efficient, bright, but erratic clock of around 10Hz. Want a picture of me? Ask, or use film.

This. Projects like this already exist to blind surveillance cameras.

Re: Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses

#114
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tech's there. The genie can't be put back in the bottle, and it will only get cheaper and more invasive. Only question we have any control over is... do we want everyone to have it, or only govs and corps? There's a second-amendment-like argument here, imo, that is very hard to push back on - because at least this stuff doesn't kill people. I want every cop to be surrounded by five or six recording devices that t…

Are you forgetting Google Glass? We put this genie back into the bottle once: we can do it again.

I was going to write something about that. The "techno fatalism" is annoyingly strong nowadays.

Re: Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses

#115

The company feels like the corporate embodiment of its founder.

HN was positive on him at one point. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2157445 >I really applaud Zuckerberg for positively embracing all the attention that's been shouldered on him, really. I think stuff like this SNL skit or him taking his core team at Facebook to watch "The Social Network" together at a movie theatre just shows tremendous inner strength and maturity on his part. It's great to see him be able to…

You say that like people shouldn’t be allowed to change their opinion of other people.

Re: Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses

#116
post #38

I wish something like this existed that was completely offline. I'm face blind (prosopagnosia) so being able to feed an offline database photos of friends so it can recognise them would be great. Accessibility shouldn't require giving up privacy.

Honestly, if any big tech would implement it this way, it's likely Apple. Their image face recognition in Photos currently is fully on device from what I understand and it is set by who you associate it with locally.

I’m not sure why they don’t do it this way already with the meta glasses.

Online comparison just adds latency.

Re: Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses

#117

I wish something like this existed that was completely offline. I'm face blind (prosopagnosia) so being able to feed an offline database photos of friends so it can recognise them would be great. Accessibility shouldn't require giving up privacy.

I find myself asking this every time a new software product is released. "Nice, but why can't this be usable without an account and a tether to the developer's cloud?"

And the answer is monetization. We can't just solve a problem. It has to have a business model built around it. No exceptions.

Re: Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses

#118

Another case of really cool tech done badly. Imagine a world in which you could use facial recognition, have an instant summary in front of you you reminding you of someone's birthday, the names of their kids ... Then imagine that it wasn't tracked, recorded, saved, or tied into anything at all. Just a useful service, in service to only you. Thanks Meta et al, for pushing forward with this broken (for people) model o…

I don't want superficial interactions with people pretending to remember my birthday or children using details from a fucking glasses summary.

If I wanted to chat with someone pretending to be interested in me I could just answer the door when salesmen come knocking.

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