Augmented reality enthusiasts dream of a future where having access to data everywhere will give us the eyes of the Terminator. Imagine donning virtual glasses that display digital captions describing everything you look at. Stare at a building, and a caption spits out when it was built; look at a stranger on a bus and a digital bubble appears in the corner of your eye, displaying his name and age.

We're not quite there yet, but Swedish software company Astonishing Tribe is taking one step toward that reality. The company is experimenting with "augmented identification" on smartphones to identify people just by snapping a photo of them. Demonstrated in the video above, the smartphone app Recognizr uses recognition software to create a 3-D model of a person's mug. Then it transmits the model to a server, which matches it with an image stored in the database. An online server performs facial recognition and shoots back a name of the subject and links to his social networking profiles.

A little creepy, right? Recognizr is still just a concept app being tested with a small number of profiles on an Android phone. We doubt anything like this will hit the consumer market soon, since the software will have to be optimized to recognize images from billions of photos across all the social networking sites out there. But still, this is an exciting glimpse into our data-injected future.

Via PopSci

See Also: