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What Are You Looking At?
Ensign Stinky writes "The NYTimes has a story, with some spooky-cool pictures, about software to extract exactly what image a person is seeing with their eyes, just from the reflection on their cornea. You can see even a wider image than the subject and tell what they're specifically focusing on. It's too bad the coolest tech is immediately subverted for evil. The possible applications listed include 'surveillance cameras that spot suspicious behavior.' Remind anyone of that scene in the movie 'Wild Wild West' where they extract the last thing the dead guy saw?"
It's too bad the coolest tech is immediately subverted for evil. The possible applications listed include 'surveillance cameras that spot suspicious behavior.'
Hey guys, like much of the popular sci-fi literature will illustrate, its not what you might be looking at or visually or cognitvely attending to or even thinking.......its what you actively do with those thoughts or attentions. Prosecuting folks for visual attention to things that stand out (like items folks covet such as that rather nice looking Porsche below and outside my window) will be fruitless. Same goes for prosecuting "thoughtcrimes". However, cheating on exams.......could be more easily documented I suppose.....
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Just the ones that are darting from person to person, or back and forth looking for cops.
Or scanning the crowd looking for someone they're meeting. What, exactly, about "darting eyes" indicates criminal or suspicious behavior?
Sounds kinda nifty to me. As far as the surveillance part, they won't learn that much from me. Guys look at breasts a LOT. Wow. Newsflash.
They won't just know that guys look at breasts a lot. They will know whose breasts you were looking at. Big difference.
People's desire to believe they are right is much stronger than their desire to be right.
I'm constantly scanning crowds and examining people, looking for criminal activity or precursors to such activity. Does that make me a bad guy?
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine." -- RFC 1925
I find the statements about "we can go back to old pictures of JFK and see what he was looking at" to be questionable at best.
You need a LOT of pixels of the eye itself from which to reconstruct an image. Now, look at how much of a given normal picture the eyes of a person represent.
You *might* be able to reconstruct where the person is looking. You probably aren't going to have enough pixels to reconstruct what they saw.
To do that level of imaging you are going to need a picture of the person's eye at high resolution.
So the government spy cameras will have to zoom in on your eyes - call it about a 500 to one zoom. They will have to track your eyes as you move about.
And yes, if you wear sunglasses you can defeat this.
Now, what this WOULD be very useful for would be in combinatino with a head mounted display - since the display device has to subtend a large angle as viewed from the eye, the display device must have a good view of the eye. So combining the display device with an imaging device would allow the system to see what you at what you are looking, so you now have a pointing device. Theoretically, a wink or slow-blink could be a "select" operation.
Now, if they could get the focus point of the eye, they could REALLY make an interesting system - if you are focusing past the image, they could mute it - reduce the brightness, possibly even reduce the amount of information (iconify apps, reduce update rates, show only "critical" items, etc.) When they detect you've shifted focus to bring the display into focus, brighten up. Think of looking through a dirty windshield, then shifting focus to the dirt on the glass.
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There is no way you can tell what the person is mentally processing by virtue of the fact that a particular image happened to be reflected in their eye. All you can reasonably conclude is that they were facing in a particular direction. What if, for example, someone was merely staring into space, with their thoughts wandering between and betwixt something completely unrelated? Isn't that what we call daydreaming? What rational conclusion could you you possibly draw in a situation like this, and how could you refute someone's claim to the contrary?
"Our security cameras showed that you spent twenty six minutes and eighteen seconds staring directly at Ms. Jones' chest in the last month alone. I'm afraid we're going to have to let you go before she files a sexual harassment complaint with the board. Have a nice day."