A new Meta published Thursday says a system, like its AI glasses, would use facial recognition to identify people, current a series of video clips, then provide you with a highlight reel of your night.#Privacy #Meta #News


Meta Patents AI Glasses to Use Facial Recognition to Identify People, Make Highlight Reels of Your Dinner Party


Meta has filed a patent for its AI smartglasses that uses facial recognition to automatically detect who is in the frame, creates a video clip whenever one of those people does something — like picking an item up or walking around — and then generates a highlight reel of what just happened, according to a copy of the patent published Thursday. One example given is the system capturing highlights from a dinner party and then serving those up to the user.

The patent gives new, granular insight into what Meta may be planning around its highly controversial push into facial recognition in combination with its AI glasses, which have already been widely lauded as “pervert glasses.”

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Do you work at Meta and know anything else about these glasses? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.

“I’ve generated some highlights of tonight’s dinner party. Would you like to see them?” a prompt from the system says, alongside various thumbnails of what look like people laughing, according to one illustration in the patent. One section says the system may personalize highlight files using “user relationship data.”

The illustrations clearly show a person wearing a pair of glasses, looking at a group of people, then the glasses focusing on one or more people in particular.

Patentlyze, an orgaization that tracks patents, first alerted 404 Media to the patent on Friday.



A gallery of screenshots from the article.

The patent is dense with how such a system would work, but in sum, the system with one or more cameras receives an input from the user, then uses machine-learning and “sensory data” to figure out points of interest in the camera’s field of view. That can include detecting people in the shot “based on one or more facial recognition algorithms,” identifying those specific people, detecting their facial expressions, using “eye gaze data of the user captured by the client system,” and figuring out other points of interest “based on scene and semantic understanding.”

With those people and actions identified, the system would then make various “highlight files.”
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Although the patent is for “particular camera-based tasks by particular systems in a particular manner” — in this case, the company’s smart glasses — Meta writes it “contemplates assisting users in any suitable camera-based task by any suitable system in any suitable manner.” Meaning that although this technology is focused on the glasses, maybe the company will use it for other purposes in the future. It is also not clear if these ideas will ultimately make their way into a final product or update for the glasses.

Meta is continuing to push its AI smart glasses despite widespread pushback and criticism. In June, WIRED reported that Meta silently added facial recognition code for its smart glasses to millions of phones. Meta removed the code shortly after WIRED’s discovery.

Meta did not respond to a request for comment.