Identifying local landmarks and uncovering hidden coupons are fun augmented reality applications, but “Programming iPhone Sensors” author Alasdair Allan has a loftier AR goal.
“I’m terrible with faces and names,” he said during a recent interview at OSCON. “So, I want those little glasses where you see someone and it’s like: ‘This is Gary. You met him in 2005. His wife is called Mary. He’s got three kids. His birthday is …’. That sort of thing. That’s my ultimate goal.”
Allan’s ideal is based on facial recognition, which is a step above facial detection. But you can’t have identification without detection, and detection is something we’re close to seeing in real-time. Allan himself successfully built a real-time face detection demo on the iPhone 3GS. The iPhone 4’s improved hardware makes the same functionality easier to implement. (Not trivial … just easier.)
Allan touched on a number of additional topics during our OSCON chat, including:
- How (theoretically) a geolocation database — like SimpleGeo — could be matched up with a cloud-based facial recognition database.
- How iPhoto’s Faces tool could influence FaceTime and other real-time video applications.
- He closed with a brief rundown on the types of sensors commonly found in many smartphones … and why the introduction of gyroscopes in Android phones is now a near inevitability.
The full interview is available in the following video:
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