AVG Announces Invisibility Glasses

BrianFagioli writes So what do these glasses from AVG Innovation Labs actually do? The security firm claims it can protect your identity in this new era of cameras everywhere. From the article: "'Through a mixture of technology and specialist materials, privacy wearables such as invisibility glasses can make it difficult for cameras or other facial recognition technologies to get a clear view of your identity', AVG claims. This is still in the prototype phase of testing, though it has been officially announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. There's a lot of science behind this -- a series of infrared lights surrounding the eyes and nose is not visible to other people, but cameras will pick it up making recognition difficult at best. There's also reflective materials involved, which aids in the blocking, or so it's claimed."

Comments

Until it hits Facebook...

[PhilHibbs]

So when someone takes a picture of you wearing these glasses, uploads it to Facebook and tags you...

Re:*sighs*

[wonkey_monkey]

Regular old glass blocks the vast majority of infrared. No special IR "emitters" are necessary.

How would you imagine than an IR emitter would block IR, in any case?

The emitters are there to dazzle IR-sensitive cameras.

Re:*sighs*

[DarkOx]

The point of the emitters is not block IR but screw up the camera's exposure. Ever take a picture of someone standing in front of bright light source, and had the subject come out all dark? Its fooled the camera's light meter.

Same kind of deal here, either the IR will wash out the image of the rest of your face, over exposing, or fool the camera into thinking the reflected light is greater than it is, under exposing. Either way the resulting image will be less detailed. There are darkroom/photo editing tricks to overcome this to a degree but it will complicate the process greatly for automated systems.

How the TSA will feel about it remains to be seen.