By Gavin Boyle
After waffling on the issue due to safety concerns, Meta recently announced it will be incorporating some level of facial recognition features into its AI glasses when the new generation releases this fall.
“Glasses are the ideal form factor for both AI and the Metaverse,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said about the tech. “They enable you to let an AI see what you see, hear what you hear, and talk to you throughout the day. And they let you blend the physical and digital worlds together with holograms.”
“More than a billion people worldwide wear glasses today, and it seems highly likely that these will become AI glasses over the next 5 to 10 years,” Zuckerberg added. “Building the devices that people use to experience our services lets us deliver the highest-quality AI and social experiences. This will serve as an amplifier for all the opportunities I mentioned so far and unlock some new opportunities as well.”
The current generation of the technology enables users to perform many functions such as recording audio and video, get AI assistance and access a variety of apps. The next generation of the technology will expand on these offerings through facial recognition features, which could provide users information about anyone they meet on the street, an improved AI assistant which could remind users of important information — such as not to forget their keys — and the inclusion of a small display which could expand the use of different apps.
While much of this technology has previously been achieved, the largest problem to rolling it out has been battery life. When tested on the current generation of the Meta glasses, the improved AI mode, for example, kills the battery in 30 minutes or less. However, the company touts that the new generation of glasses can run the system for multiple hours on one charge.
It remains unclear, however, if the inclusion of facial recognition will be challenged in court for being too much of a security risk. Some have already raised the alarm after researchers added facial recognition to the current glasses and allowed these users to pull of sensitive information about people in seconds.
Related: Meta Ray-Ban Smart Glasses Can Now Post Instagram Stories
“We stream the video from the glasses straight to Instagram and have a computer program monitor the stream,” they explained. “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 relative’s names. And it’s all fed back to an app we wrote on our phone.”
If they prove to be as large of a security risk as they seem, hopefully regulators will step in and block the technology before it reaches a mass audience.
Read Next: Meta’s Smart Glasses Could Dox People in Seconds
- Content: +2Share:
- Content: +1