Hasta La Gadget!

Brazil’s police are getting augmented reality glasses that use a small camera to identify criminals in a crowd. Photo: Flickr user Marcus Vegas

The Brazilian police force is getting a little bit Terminator on its citizens. Well, on its criminals at least.

No, they haven’t built a humanoid killer, they’ve just taken a cue from the augmented, analytical sight capabilities of cinema cyborgs. In the next few weeks, Brazilian police will begin testing pairs of “RoboCop” glasses, which can identify a criminal’s face in a crowd of people.

“To the naked eye, two people may appear identical,” says Major Leandro Pavani Agostini, chief of military police in Sao Paolo. But these powerful shades can scan up to 400 faces per second, up to 50 yards away, using 46,000 biometric points to identify an individual and ensure a correct match.

Faces are scanned with a tiny camera in the glasses then checked against a database of known criminals. A red light pops up if a perpetrator is found, and the cop can apprehend them without the need for questioning or requesting documents.

The settings of the glasses are adjustable, so if a crowd is more sparse and spread out, it can identify faces as far as 12 miles away at a slower rate.

Rio de Janeiro will be host to the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games, so these “RoboCop” glasses could prove to be a very useful safety measure.

Brazilian Police Debut ‘RoboCop’ Glasses [AOL News via PopSci]

We’ve seen augmented reality done what seems like a million different ways, but we’ve never seen it quite like this. The New York Times reported Wednesday on a forthcoming iPhone app called Aurasma that has the power to turn ink-and-paper publications into interactive mine fields. Aurasma, conceived by enterprise software firm Autonomy, uses a scaled down version of the outfit’s IDOL pattern recognizer to identify images stored in a vast database, and then converts those images into related video. Unfortunately, the first release of the app, scheduled for sometime next month, comes in the form of an AR advertisement / game for an unidentified upcoming movie, and the company’s founder seems solidly focused on the technology’s marketing potential. No word yet on when or if we can expect to see our New York Times come to life, as seen in the video at the source link below, but if this is the future of augmented reality, count us in.

Continue reading Aurasma’s AR iPhone app to turn everyday objects into multimedia triggers (video)

Aurasma’s AR iPhone app to turn everyday objects into multimedia triggers (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 09 Apr 2011 01:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  New York Times  | Email this | Comments

No matter how hard Skype and others try to convince us otherwise, we still do most of our web communications via text or, if entirely unavoidable, by voice. Maybe we’re luddites or maybe video calling has yet to prove its value. Hoping to reverse such archaic views, researchers at the MIT Media Lab have harnessed a Kinect’s powers of depth and human perception to provide some newfangled videoconferencing functionality. First up, you can blur out everything on screen but the speaker to keep focus where it needs to be. Then, if you want to get fancier, you can freeze a frame of yourself in the still-moving video feed for when you need to do something off-camera, and to finish things off, you can even drop some 3D-aware augmented reality on your viewers. It’s all a little unrefined at the moment, but the ideas are there and well worth seeing. Jump past the break to do just that.

Continue reading Kinect used to make teleconferencing actually kind of cool (video)

Kinect used to make teleconferencing actually kind of cool (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 04 Apr 2011 03:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Kinected Conference (MIT Media Lab)  | Email this | Comments

Continue reading NAVTEQ’s Destination Maps provide mobile guidance through malls, outer reaches of your mind

NAVTEQ’s Destination Maps provide mobile guidance through malls, outer reaches of your mind originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 Mar 2011 12:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  IDG News (PCWorld)  | Email this | Comments

It isn’t exactly a spring chicken, nor is it particularly new to the advertising game — Best Buy utilized the stuff back in 2009 to push electronics — but a new ad campaign from manly body spray purveyor Lynx (Axe in the US) is making augmented reality nearly unavoidable. Created by BBH, a global ad agency, the video below shows travelers at London’s Victoria train station staring up at a giant screen to find themselves greeted by a skimpily attired fallen angel. The stunt, launched on March 6, drew a lot of attention from passersby, and in more than one instance elicited some pretty, well, bold behavior. Up until now, augmented reality has mostly been a play thing of the geek set — even previous advertisements enlisting such tactics required a decent amount of work from the audience — but if these fallen angels are any sign, we could all be traversing a more unreal world very soon.

[Thanks, Ben]

Continue reading Lynx augmented reality stunt drops scantly clad angels on terrestrial travelers (video)

Lynx augmented reality stunt drops scantly clad angels on terrestrial travelers (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 Mar 2011 15:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  thelynxeffect (YouTube)  | Email this | Comments