You know the trope in Sherlock-esque detective
shows where some brilliant sleuth cracks a case by drawing on their
nigh-photographic memory? Well, one of the most fascinating and
terrifying things about augmented reality glasses is that they turn everybody into that sleuth — and as a new Microsoft patent filing
shows, that can be used for things besides crime-solving. The recently
published application covers a system that would let its HoloLens
glasses track small items like car keys, stopping wearers from
misplacing them. More broadly, the patent describes a system that can
monitor the status of objects without any instructions from users,
keeping tabs on anything that’s important to their lives.
The patent’s basic idea is pretty simple. HoloLens has
outward-facing cameras that can make a spatial map of a room, and
machine vision technology can identify or track specific objects in an
image. So if, for example, you put your keys down on a table, HoloLens
could hypothetically spot them through the camera and quietly note their
position. When you’re about to leave the house, it could give you the
keys’ last known location, even if they’ve since been covered up by a
newspaper or slipped under a couch cushion.
This seems like a pretty inefficient way to find your
keys today, or possibly ever. For one thing, you’d need to be
consistently wearing smart glasses, which is currently staggeringly
inconvenient. If you drop your keys somewhere without looking at them,
the system might not register that they’ve moved. It’s not clear how
much it would help if you slipped something in a coat pocket or bag and
then carried it around, unless it’s got some very complex multi-location
tracking. It’s not hard to slap a Bluetooth tracker on an item if
you’re consistently losing it. And by the time we get to a future of
24/7 augmented reality, we may not have keys at all.
But what’s really interesting isn’t the idea of HoloLens
tracking an object. It’s HoloLens learning what items matter to you and
choosing what to follow, before you ever worry about losing something.
To be clear, you could designate objects: one example has a
traveler telling HoloLens to track their passport while abroad. In other
cases, though, it could check to see how often you interact with an
object, or when you move it around, and start tracking anything that
hits a certain threshold.
Any object you pick up and carry to work every morning, for example,
could be more important than the glass of orange juice you place on the
table beforehand. If you pull an object out of your pocket at a
restaurant, HoloLens could automatically warn you to grab it when you
leave. This could even extend to things like checking your fridge to see
if an item that’s usually present is absent or depleted, and reminding
you to buy it when you enter a grocery store hours later.
This is where an augmented reality headset becomes truly
transformative: instead of ticking off a checklist, it anticipates needs
you didn’t realize you had. That’s also when it starts feeling a little
scary. If multiple people are wearing headsets, the patent describes
how data could be shared between them, so you could find your keys even
if someone else has moved them. This is fairly innocuous, but it could
also do something like alert an abusive spouse that their partner was
leaving the house. Remember when a targeted advertising flyer reportedly revealed
a girl’s pregnancy to her parents? Imagine what a company like
Microsoft or Google could do with an all-seeing headset that finds
patterns in your every move — or what law enforcement agencies could do
with “metadata” that’s essentially an inventory of your life.
HoloLens obviously isn’t the only piece of tech that can
track or reveal our secrets, and patents are often about as close to
reality as a sci-fi novel. Even if Microsoft had such a system working,
HoloLens is so limited and uncomfortable today that nobody’s going to be
casually reading the morning paper in it. But it’s a particularly
interesting manifestation of panoptic quantified-life tech, and one that
it’s not hard to imagine cropping up again in the future — not just in
patent filings.
Source : TheVerge
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