Meta plans to add a facial recognition feature to its Ray-Ban smart glasses as soon as this year, reports The New York Times ($). According to people involved in the plans who spoke to the publication, the feature is internally called "Name Tag," and would let wearers identify people and get information about them via Meta's artificial intelligence assistant. Mark Zuckerberg reportedly wants the feature to differentiate the devices and to make the AI assistant in the glasses more useful.

Meta plans to add a facial recognition feature to its Ray-Ban smart glasses as soon as this year, reports The New York Times ($). According to people involved in the plans who spoke to the publication, the feature is internally called “Name Tag,” and would let wearers identify people and get information about them via Meta’s artificial intelligence assistant. Mark Zuckerberg reportedly wants the feature to differentiate the devices and to make the AI assistant in the glasses more useful.

  • Ghostie@lemmy.zip
    2·
    2 hours ago

    From my understanding, IR tech is aimed at identifying an individual via the eyes mainly with facial proportions as supplemental. Not all are like this but a lot of the commonly used facial recognition tech is. I’ve been able to do trials with iOS facial recognition, android facial recognition, and some ID cameras at my local gym. I was also able to test against a couple facial recognition features in some security cameras. I have a few friends that work security in a couple places and they let me try it. I used IR blocking sunglasses, regular sunglasses, a mask, and a hat in different combinations.

    The majority of the times I was identified correctly I didn’t have my IR blockers on. It didn’t matter what other things I had on to cover my face. So I’m not sure facepaint will work unless it is done specifically in a way that visibly obfuscates and breaks up facial features to look inhuman. I’ve never tried that. The majority of the failures to identify me, I only had my IR blockers on, so I question how much facial proportions weigh on IDing someone. That means IR blockers, a mask, and a hat can potentially do well in keeping you anonymous in normal everyday situations from cameras. You will look suspicious to people with all that on though. I want to emphasize my testing wasn’t exhaustive by any means, so I encourage people to be skeptical of how consistent that will keep you anonymous. I still am.

    Something interesting is that iOS and android failed to ID me with only the IR blockers on, every time. That means most current phones rely on using the eyes to ID people. So that stands to reason that ICE agents’ phone hardware they are using to ID people’s face may have trouble with IR blocking, assuming the tools they use leverages the tech in consumer grade phones and they don’t have more sophisticated hardware in the phones they use.