By combining connected glasses with facial recognition software, it is possible to know everything about the people you meet in the street, just by observing them. Fascinating and terrifying!
While you are walking quietly down the street, a stranger approaches you. Very quickly, you understand that he seems to know you very well. He knows your name, where you live, where you studied, where you work, who your parents are. However, you are certain: you have never met. How can he know all this?
The answer is most surprising: thanks to his glasses. It’s very simple, he only needed to observe you for a few seconds to know everything about you. Behind this scenario worthy of an episode of Black Mirror is the I-XRAY project, led by AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, two students from Harvard, the famous American university.
For their project, they used a pair of connected glasses from Ray-Ban and Meta, which they combined with facial recognition software to automatically identify people in the street. “The information our tool collects from a simple photo of your face is astounding”indicates AnhPhu Nguyen in a video published on X.
In fact, the integrated mini camera films and sends the images to Instagram Live – a live video stream. The artificial intelligence then spots a face, uploads it to Pimeyes – a public database of faces – then explores the results to find a match and gather as much information as possible about the person. A summary sheet is displayed on the glasses wearer’s smartphone, via an application developed for the occasion, with all the data collected.
During their tests, the two students managed to find the name, telephone number, address and even the names of relatives of many people they met in the street. And with the intelligence gathered in a matter of seconds, they were able to accost them and pretend they knew them.
This invention is as incredible as it is terrifying. And we can well imagine what people with ill intentions could do with them, as highlighted by the many worried reactions to their demonstration.
But don’t panic, this system is not for sale. The two students will not make their tool public: they developed it with the laudable aim of warning about the dangers of facial recognition. Their “aim is to demonstrate the current capabilities of smart glasses, face search engines, large language models and public databases, raising awareness that it is now possible to extract the address of ‘a person and other personal information from just their face on the street’they explain in a document detailing their work. Needless to say, the demonstration is dull to say the least!