Duke University Dev Working on Google Glass App to Distinguish Friends by Clothing

[dgstorm]

Have you ever tried to meet up with a friend at a crowded public location, and had trouble finding them. Supposedly, a Duke University researcher and developer is working on an app for Google Glass that will help with that. The app will attempt to distinguish your friends by how they dress. Here's a quote detailing the concept,

The app, called InSight, is said to work by having people submit photos of themselves in various normal outfits that they would wear. The app would then create a profile for that person using a combination of a spatiogram, basically a color histogram created by identifying the colors, and spatial distributions, and wavlets, which identify the textures and patterns of clothing. The team is calling that profile a "fingerprint", which would then be transferred to Glass and used to potentially pick that person out of a crowd, even if their back is to you.

Assuming they can get over all the hurdles (like the fact that no one actually wears the same clothes all the time) and make this app work as advertised, then a whole new privacy can of worms could be opened up. The only saving grace is that it will likely be an "opt-in" model since it will only work with your friends who agree to it. While the idea seems intriguing, it seems like pie-in-the-sky thinking to make something like this work. Share your perspective.

Source: PhoneArena