In a recent article we covered an emerging use of the Google Glass, where a manufacturer paired the device with MTConnect, a standard for monitoring numerically controlled machine tools. With the device, which they are calling MTConnect+Google Glass, users can freely roam the factory floor and gather and share machine data.
It was just a few months back that a colleague and I were talking about the potential of Glass in the machine vision industry, so it was nice to see it being used in such a capacity already. Aside from machine vision though, the Glass is sure to have plenty of non-traditional uses, one of which may be for facial recognition purposes.
Stephen Balaban, an engineer at Lambda Labs explains in the NPR article that he essentially built an alternative operating system that runs on Glass but is not controlled by Google, which would allow the device to do all kinds of things that Google’s designers didn’t have in mind, one of which is of course facial recognition.
Now, there has already been backlash regarding privacy and Google Glass, but what about the potential merits of facial recognition? First and foremost, most people are probably thinking of things like law enforcement and defense, which makes sense. But what about other things like finding a friend in a crowd or perhaps recognizing a person you are supposed to from a dating website?
Right – probably not a good idea to walk into a blind date wearing Google Glass, but I think you get the idea.
