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Comment by atomicUpdate | Hacker News Reader

> A killer app for me would be floating name tags above people's heads, but I imagine that would require better HW than what is available here.

This is a societal issue, more than a HW/SW issue. Google Glass explicitly bans this type of feature:

https://developers.google.com/glass/policies#c_what_you_cant...

> Don't use the camera or microphone to cross-reference and immediately present personal information identifying anyone other than the user, including use cases such as facial recognition and voice print. Glassware that do this will not be approved at this time.

This is in response to Congress raising Privacy concerns: https://slate.com/technology/2013/05/google-glass-facial-rec...

I wouldn't expect any "official" facial recognition on any of these upcoming AR devices any time soon.

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> > A killer app for me would be floating name tags above people's heads, but I imagine that would require better HW than what is available here.

Which is too bad, since I see AR as potentially being a massively useful device for those with memory issues, dementia, or who generally need some help with things like this.

As someone who has struggled with names and dates and times my whole life, that is the single use that I was interested in.

floating name tags over heads

I'd have given anything for that 35 years ago. First thing on any contract job, I'd make a map of desks & names - but it always tripped me up when people slipped over to work at a different desk!

As someone with prosopagnosia, that was my first thought too.

The dystopian use case of this is: See the name of someone + how they voted last time. Then you can „engage“ them to convince them of your „truth“.

The Google Glass backlash (which may well have happened to any AR glasses) has set back practical use of AR in private life so much. It's frustrating, especially because of the splash damage it's had.

What's particularly odd to me is that many people seem to be sensitive about, specifically, cameras in glasses. I sometimes literally wear a bodycam, not subtle at all, and it's mostly ignored, while with no-camera HUD glasses people get nervous that there's a camera there.

I hope that we can eventually get away with stuff like real-time facial ID as an adaptive technology feature - though the only way that will work is if we can get it pretty much invisible. Or we finally get used to all being recorded all the time anyway and stop freaking out about it.

the difference is if the camera is obvious then you at least know you're being recorded. playing a guessing game 24/7 is exhausting. being recorded once in awhile not such a big deal. having to watch every word and every action you do all the time? not nice.

This is a case where people's expectations really need to catch up. We're being recorded in so many ways in so many situations that "helping someone remember your name" is really the least of your concerns.

Unfortunately, that's also why "auto-name-tagging" is never going to happen. It doesn't help the gigantocorps who are already tracking us through wifi and IR and seismic patterns in public places. They've had data that could make the individual experience immeasurably better for nearly 15 years now, but they conveniently use "privacy concerns" to avoid having to acknowledge it in public. As long as there is a modicum of suspension of disbelief, they can continue to collect all the data they want for their own purposes and to hell with anyone who wants to use their own data for their own purposes.

It will happen eventually, like the end of Columbus day.

user will upload they pictures to cloud, now company have picture of everyone live in their village.

Not even an exception for user-entered data.

Like, I could conceivably take photos of people I meet, store those photos along with notes in the iOS notes app (or even a contact app) then create a panel of those photos so that I can tap the right person and bring up those notes when I see them again. AR would simply make this easier and faster. Unless the AR camera was hidden it would not make it different from a privacy perspective.

To make things more confusing, both the iOS photos app and Google Photos automatically find faces in your photos and the other photos containing them and let you easily tag each face with the correct name. The technology to do this already exists.

Exactly what I was thinking.. Have the feature offline but that would require storage I suppose. Also, the tagging in photo apps were another aspect I thought of. It is ok to tag in one instance but not another.

It’s ok if they are the ones to do it. Safe old big tech. It’s not ok if these nefarious nerds with bad memories do it.

> easier and faster

That's the thing. The privacy implications are different at scale.

A world of FOSS tools, where centralized ID databases are heavily restricted or banned, and people are using facial recognition technology on people they encounter in their lives and tag, that would be fairly harmless, perhaps even doing much more good than harm.

But it's not going to play out like that. How many of us run speech transcription software on our own machines, and how many of us use a remote service?

> Google Glass explicitly bans this type of feature:

But that's, like, 90% of what I'd want something like that for. Not for everyone in my field of view, of course, but when I'm out in the field I meet a lot of people in a short time and I can never remember everyone's names. Work shirts with embroidered names are an absolute godsend.

I'd love something like that too, but google glass wasn't designed for you or your needs. It was designed to plaster ads over everything you see while continuously collecting data on everything you point your face at. That's the problem with technology today. However useful it could be for you, it isn't really created for your benefit. Instead every new technology today is used against you, even when it does allow you to do something you want with it.

Self driving cars will track everywhere you go and when and ultimately decide where you'll be allowed to go and when, augmented reality will make it so you can't see anything without an ad playing, robots in your home will record you and catalog everything you own, the phone in your pocket already tracks you and everyone you care about, etc. It's hard to think of a single popular tech product that isn't collecting data and working for someone other than the "owner" who paid to bring it into their home.

Even this open source AR project is guilty of it. Their privacy policy says they'll collect your personal data to use for marketing. Any tool or tech that requires an account and/or requires connections to someone else's servers is likely going to be used against you, but I hope that someday we get a fully self-hosted, open source product that runs on trustworthy hardware so we can do things like keep track of people's names, record our experiences, and shape the way we see the world without putting ourselves and those around us at risk.

>This is a societal issue, more than a HW/SW issue. Google Glass explicitly bans this type of feature:

Seems like one of those things that can't be stopped. It can be slowed, as Google has done, but eventually OSS will allow for it. If it is massively outlawed then it can be reduced, but even then it'll still be on the level of hidden cameras.

> This is a societal issue, more than a HW/SW issue. Google Glass explicitly bans this type of feature:

Which is ridiculous, it is giving an advantage to people who were born with a good memory for faces.

Do not allow for lookups in any sort of online database, all tagging has to be done locally by the user.

> I wouldn't expect any "official" facial recognition on any of these upcoming AR devices any time soon.

I would, just not for the general public. This would be very helpful for police to immediately do a check on people around them and spot people with active warrants.

By that logic, why not just put cameras everywhere, use image recognition tech to do all the identification and enforcement, from traffic violations to active warrants, China-style?

That’s a great idea!!

Should they also ban people who have good memories? Or someone who has handlers who tells them who's who?

I get there's a balance, but at some point, it's a problem that holds individuals back and supports the elite.

That’s why open source is so nice right?

Pretty wild for congress to raise privacy concerns, considering the ungodly amount of data they harvest every day on both their own citizens and those of other countries across a variety of mediums, agencies, and subsidiaries...

gotta point out that explicitly banning putting names over people is explictly excluding a very useful accessibility accommodation for folks with any degree of faceblindness.

It can 100% be done in a non-sketchy way by simply limiting the names to the names you've manually entered for people you've seen and tagged before.

folks need to stop ignoring disabled people and / or going "yeah well who cares about disabled people's needs".

It'd be useful for teachers who are trying to remember the class' names! Geofenced, of course.

So Google basically banned Ironman! I am sure the government uses such devices responsibly ;)

maybe open source will help with that. maybe some nobody will make those features and you can sideload and it'll be quiet enough that no one will know for awhile.

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