newVideoPlayer("/panasoniclifewall.flv", 506, 380,""); If only the ancient Chinese Had Panasonic’s LifeWall, they could have fended off nomadic tribes with HDTV instead of bricks and battlements. But since we live in the future, we can shut out the rest of the world with television that not only stretches from floor to ceiling, it follows people around the room. Panasonic’s prototype LifeWall, exhibited at CEATEC outside Tokyo, is a room-sized screen that tracks and remembers users with face recognition, which the firm calls You-Know-Me-TV. galleryPost('panasoniclifewall', 3, '');
Most people have thousands of digital photos in their collections. One of the cool new features available in Picasa’s Web Albums (which kind of got swept away in the torrent of Chrome coverage the last couple of days) is the ability to tag faces in your photos quickly and easily.
If you have photos on a Picasa web album already, you can enable the feature in settings. It then scans all your photos in the Picasa web album, before grouping similar faces together. You then work through those by giving name tags.
You’ll quite often have to repeat the same person in different groups of photos, so it’s a far from perfect solution. But it does make the tagging process much quicker than manually going through every photo.
It’s also secure, enabling better searching and more freedom for specific collections of photos, and you can share tagged photos with the people in them easily as well. Any images you share via Picasa also only shares the nicknamed tag you’ve put on the photo, not any further details like contact information.
This is a really useful development for cataloguing your photos, but why it’s only available online and not in desktop photo management software like iPhoto or Picasa for Windows is beyond me. Hopefully we’ll see it rolled out to desktop applications sooner rather than later.
A new biometric face scanner from the Japanese company Sagawa Advance has taken the technology to the next level, able to differentiate between identical twins with no problems at all. It does this by using an infrared scanner to analyse a whopping 40,000 data points on your face.
Over 100,000 construction workers on the 2012 Olympics venue in London will be subjected to biometric tests while they build the site. The two-tier system will scan hands and faces, and should be up and running by June this year, when work starts on the 50-acre site. And these measures, part of the $700 million security budget, will not just be for the building contractors, either.
Listen up, Japanese teens: vending machine maker Fujitaka Co. is on to your sneaky cigarette-buying ways, and has created a machine that uses a camera and face recognition software to try and stop you. The machine takes your picture when you press the “Adult Recognition” button, and analyzes your face for wrinkles and sagging. If it thinks you aren’t saggy enough, you must insert your licence for age verification. In a test of 500 people, the machine spotted adults with 90% accuracy. Looks like the big kid with the crustache sitting at the back of your math class is about to be your new best friend; at least until you smoke enough to get wrinkled and buy cigarettes on your own. [Textually via The Raw Feed]
Lenovo’s previously Asia-only Y-series notebooks just crossed the Bering Strait and landed in the US, bringing both facial recognition, a 1.3-megapixel webcam, and a special Shuttle Center control that lets you play back music and movies without booting the main system. Underneath these special features are pretty standard-issue equipment for a laptop around $735: 1.46GHz Pentium, Vista, 1GB Memory, 14.1-inch display, 160GB hard drive, and DVD burner. You can get a little beefier by buying from Office Depot and getting a 1.66GHz Core 2 Duo and 2GB memory, which costs $900. [Lenovo via Electronista]
Don’t you hate accidentally smiling at 17% capacity and having no one tell you? Omron has released what they’re calling “Smile Measurement Software,” which tells you what your smile factor is on a scale of 0 to 100%. The software uses 3D face mapping technology to, “ensure accurate smile detection and measurement even when the subject is not looking into the camera”—which is great for when you’re really trying to get 83% joy out of someone.
The software can be used on digital cameras, mobile phones and things of that nature to —well, I’m not sure. It’d be a useful little gadget to put in a screening room for a comedy, or measure how happy your friends are in your company. Either way, I eagerly await to see what creepy uses are thought of for this technology. [Akihabara News]
While $6,299 can buy you a boatload of Hello Kitty book bags, t-shirt and keychains, that small mountain of cash will only buy you one Hello Kitty Robot. Now up for preorder, the lovable robot can chat with a child in three different personality modes: as a close friend, with the family and as a guessing game. But that’s just the tip of the proverbial Hello Kitty iceberg.
If you thought cameras that could read your license plate were an invasion of privacy, you’re not going to like NEC’s new camera system that they unveiled yesterday. It’s a face-recognition system that’s designed to ID people while they’re in their cars. It’ll initially be used at the Hong Kong border, where people with national ID cards can get through faster by being verified by the cameras. That doesn’t seem all too bad, but you can imagine the slippery slope that this puts us on, and it’s not pretty.
