This article was 1st published on our sister Site – Digital World Native
It’s old hat that passwords can be stolen or clonned or…whatever. Now, as the digital world starts veering towards facial recognition rather than passwords to unlock accounts, anti-virus firm AVG seems already 1 step ahead. It unveiled what it calls, “Invisibility Glasses”, on the eve of this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) at Barcelona, Spain. The glasses are powered by technology that will help protect & secure a user’s visual identity.
The device, as AVG Innovations Lab has explained, is just proof of concept. It is the tech that AVG will continue working on. And before you get the wrong idea, no, the glasses does not make the wearer invisible. But it will make it hard for cameras & other facial recognition technologies to grab pictures of users’ faces that can then be used to match it in a database, thus unlocking others account on the sly.
For example, facial-recognition technologies, such as Facebook’s DeepFace can soon be used by anyone to not only recognize you, but also cross-reference your face to other data found Online. The Invisibility Glasses can also be extremely useful in guarding your privacy in situations where anyone with a camera or smartphone can take a picture & post it Online without your permission. Further, Big Data & streetcam projects like Google’s StreetView raise the possibility of people zooming in on you & observing you.
So how does the Invisibility Glasses work? It’s still a prototype, but there are 2 technologies being tried out here. 1 is the use of infra-red rays around the frame of the glasses that makes it virtually impossible to see the eyes & nose in a picture taken while you are wearing the glasses. The drawback is that some mobile phone cameras may have the ability to filter out infrared signals & focus on the rest of the light to grab a clear enough picture.
The other technique they are trying out is the use of retro-reflective materials that send reflected back light in exactly the same direction it came from. This means that when someone uses a camera flash, al that light gets sent back towards the camera lens, thus effectively blinding the camera with a flash of light at the exact moment when the shutter clicks.
Unveiled at the tech show event Pepcom held prior to MWC, AVG says rather than designing a product for market release, tech experts are investigating how technology can be adapted to combat the daily erosion of our privacy in the digital age.
Oh, well, so don’t expect to see them for sale any time soon.
Image Credit: AVG Innvoations Labs
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