Google Glass can do a lot of things. It can provide notifications, directions, perform calls, run apps and more. Each day the list of things that Google Glass is capable of doing grows. Google Glass is now even able to detect how the person standing right next to you feels. Yup, you read that right. If you don’t already know, there’s a new glassware out there that can be used to identify a person’s gender, guess their age and guess what their emotional status is in real time.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits (Fraunhofer IIS) has been working on an image analysis system for many years. Fraunhofer IIS refers to their image analysis system as SHORE, or Sophisticated High-speed Object Recognition Engine. SHORE is basically a facial recognition software and it is capable of identifying a lot of different things about someone. This includes emotions, age, and gender.

Recently, SHORE was ported over to Google Glass. So now, Google Glass can technically process and identify emotions, genders, and age in real-time.

SHORE’s technology was built using the C++ programming language and it is able to perform facial analysis with the help of a database filled with thousands of faces. While the Google Glass application has to access SHORE’s library of data to identify things, Fraunhofer says everything is processed locally and nothing is uploaded onto the cloud. So, while this application might seem slightly invasive, there’s really nothing dangerous about using it.

So, how could something like this be useful in the real world? Well, Fraunhofer IIS thinks that the application can be used as a communication aid by people who struggle to identify emotions. People in the autism spectrum, for example, have a hard time identifying emotions. So, people in the autism spectrum particularly might benefit greatly when it comes to using this application while having social interactions. If you know how someone is feeling and responding to what you’re saying, then you’re going to be able to communicate better. That’s quite obvious.

Fraunhofer IIS also thinks that the application could be used for market analyses. To see what people’s emotional reaction is to certain things that are being sold or played around them.

Overall, the application does have a purpose in this world, despite it seeming slightly invasive and creepy. Currently, the glassware / Google Glass app isn’t available for download. It doesn’t seem like the institute who created it plans on releasing it to the public. Really, it seems they just created it for their own testing, which is still cool.

So, what do you think about this? Do you think it’s cool or bad? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section down below!

Source: Cnet