Face.com's API can now detect your mood and expression. Awesome or creepy?

Does the internet know when you’re smiling? That’s a rhetorical question. Of course it can. Face.com, makers of a top notch facial recognition API, recently announced it was now capable of detecting the moods and expressions of people in photos it scans. Now, not only can the API tell who you are, it can say whether you were happy, sad, smiling, or even kissing. Face.com is the creator of the popular PhotoFinder and PhotoTagger apps on Facebook, so you may soon see that capability on the social network as well as among the 20,000 developers who use the Face.com API. In related news, Facebook (using its own software) has been automatically using facial recognition to tag photos you upload since December of last year. They’ve already prompted the use of such facial scanning 2.7 billion times in the past six months! Learn more about their push for automated tagging in the video below. Facial recognition has grown so sophisticated, and cheap, that it seems it will soon leave no photo untagged, no mood unrecorded. If that idea makes you uneasy, don’t worry, the social network of the future knows exactly how you feel.

Facebook quietly rolled out their in-house facial recognition (Photo-Tag Suggest) in the US last December, allowing users to tag their friends, teaching the social network who was who. Soon there after, Facebook could automatically suggest who was in each picture, making tagging quick and easy. It’s a pretty awesome feature, and as of early June it was available “in most countries.” On June 30th, Facebook announced it had prompted its 750 million active users 2.7 billion times to try the automated tagging process, often with the rather ambiguous box on your homepage labeled “Photos are better with friends.” Naturally some privacy activists groups are crying foul, worrying that although the Photo Tag Suggest only works on your friends Facebook is collecting huge amounts of data on our appearance. ABC News has more:

Mood recognition from Face.com

The Israeli facial recognition company ABC News interviews is Face.com, who we discussed a little over a year ago with the launch of their API. According to a recent newsletter, in the past twelve months their API has gone from a few dozen developers to over 20,000. That’s very impressive, but when you look at all the Face.com API can do, it just makes sense. Not only is the code quite capable in finding faces and matching them against others in the databases you provide, it is now able to detect moods and expressions. The Face.com API can recognize when you are happy, sad, surprised, angry, or neutral and gives a confidence interval on that analysis. Now, when sorting through photos, a developer could use the API to organize them according to how you felt at the time the pic was taken. Similarly, the API can now detect smiles, parted lips, and kissing lips, further refining the classification. Among the suggested uses for the new capabilities would be reaction detection in live chats, filtering in dating sites according to mood in profile pics, and selecting the best photos for display.

When you start to imagine the potential applications for this technology, it gets really amazing. Sure, Facebook already is pushing to be able to recognize its 750 million users, but that just tells you what everyone looks like. Face.com could make it possible to guess at relationships based just on photos. Do you always smile when you’re with someone? Maybe it’s a sign you really like them. File that away in the metadata and maybe use it to make their suggestions mean more in searches, etc. Do thousands of people take geotagged pictures at a certain location every year? Maybe that location (stadium, landmark, etc) would like to find all the happy smiling people in those pictures and use it for marketing. Filing celebrity photos for press agencies, determining when customers are unhappy during recorded events, tracking how consumers feel during market research—there are tons of ways this technology could be applied.

Expression recognition from Face.com

And it’s (mostly) free. 20,000 developers have already found uses for the Face.com API, and that’s without any of the new mood and expression detection algorithms. As we’ve discussed before, many are simply cute apps for entertainment, but with more sophisticated capabilities we’ll see more sophisticated applications. Soon, social networks, and really all internet sites, could use facial recognition technology that puts most security networks to shame.

What gets me about all of this is really how ubiquitous facial detection and recognition has become. iPhoto has it, Facebook has it, Google’s Picasa has it – all the major players have brought it online, and we’ve seen it used in advertising stunts as well. Which means that it’s probably also in many private places we don’t know about – ATMs, office buildings, etc. Somewhere along the line, this fun and amazing capability sort of creeped in everywhere. Which I may not be totally against. Your face is part of your appearance, when you show it somewhere you are publicly displaying it. If you (knowingly) allow people to record you, you should recognize that they can use it to learn more about you, including your identity. That’s part of living in a world filled with cameras and digital databases. That being said, I’m not sure it’s as creepy as we may think. Most applications of this technology have, so far, been limited to applications you are aware of, not readily searchable by the public, and increasingly secure – Face.com now supports SSL on their API for instance.

If, however, we decide we can’t live with computers being able to recognize us and our emotions, we better act fast. Face.com’s API is only going to get more sophisticated in the next year, and we’ve seen similarly advanced detection algorithms for video as well. Give them much more time, it there’ll be no telling what they’ll be capable of…

...like shooting lasers out of your eyes!

*Photo created using Laser Eyes by OneByOne Design. Click image to try it for yourself.

[image credits: Facebook, Face.com, One by One Design]
[video credit: ABC News]
[source: Face.com, Facebook]

Face.com has launched the alpha of their new API. Now, almost any site could find faces on photos.

Face.com, the company responsible for Facebook applications Photo Tagger and Photo Finder, lets you take any photo and quickly identify who is in it and where they are in the photo. This facial recognition is a boon to those tagging photos, and now Face.com is ready to bring a similar capability to the rest of the internet. May 3rd saw the launch of their new open API capable of scanning images and rapidly identifying the location, orientation, and identity of human faces. The API platform is meant for web designers who want to include a facial recognition feature on their own website. With this API, any company could let you upload a photo of yourself and find other photos of you in their database. Now in alpha testing, registering to try the API is free and very quick. Face.com, operated by Israel-based Vizi Labs, is looking to share the API with the developer community to see if the next killer application for facial recognition will arise organically. Eventually, platforms like this one may help your face become an access point to all the digital data about you on the web.

The Photo Tagger and Photo Finder applications have been big on Facebook: billions of photos processed from over 50 million users. We’ve also seen competing software that provides facial recognition on Facebook, including a rather brilliant bit of marketing for Coke Zero. As Facebook continues to expand, a growing number of websites are starting to veer towards becoming social networks, or at least picking up aspects of social networking to stay competitive/current. And photos are probably one of the largest themes of these networks. It makes sense then, that Face.com is looking to sell its photo expertise outside the FB realm. The API seems fairly easy to use, so it could be adopted easily, though their forums are disappointingly quiet for a first week of launch.

Together you and I could overthrow the Emperor and rule as...Uh...I mean the API has some interesting near term applications that are likely to be popular.

In the near term the API launch could mean many more websites will have some facial recognition gimmicks. Face.com actually goes to the trouble of suggesting some of these in their examples: quickly tagging photos through a widget, placing your face in famous photos, and finding celebrity photos on the internet. While none of these is an exactly mind-blowing idea, they are the sort of things that sell well on the web (I must admit I was drawn into playing with the “Poster Yourself” face replacer for much too long). One hopes that developers, hungry for the next big way of drawing traffic, will invent some more insightful applications for the API, but even if they don’t, it’s likely that Face.com will get plenty of mileage out of the standard time-wasters.

In the long term, being able to incorporate facial recognition into almost any web page could be a very powerful tool. You could, with just a photo, conceivably track down all sorts of information about a person – their friends, contact information, or anything else they choose to make public. In fact, Face.com paired up with Comverse to create an iPhone App that does just that, albeit only for people you already know. This “social augmented reality” application was revealed earlier this year at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Take a photo of a friend and it recognizes the individual and rapidly brings up social networking links and other data you may want to use:

Of course, privacy restrictions on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking hubs greatly reduce your access to someone’s photos without their permission. There’s little danger that someone could take a photo of you and then find you via one of these more reputable sites. In a posting on their blog, Gil Hirsch (CEO) made it very clear that similar privacy protection would apply to the Face.com API. One day however, such privacy is likely to be overcome through crafty uses of technology or general apathy on the part of the public.

As I see it, facial recognition has two basic levels of application. You can use it simply to determine what thing in a photo/video is human, and where that human’s face is. Or, you can use it to determine which human, out of billions, is in a photo. Both have some very powerful applications. We’ve seen how video filtering software can use body and facial recognition to improve security camera surveillance. We may also see our faces, or other portion of our appearance, become our all-in-one easy access key. You can use your face to open a door, others may use it to become your friend on a social network. It’s hard to know how facial recognition will be harnessed in the years ahead, but it’s clear that with companies like Face.com it will certainly be present almost everywhere we go online.

[image credits: Face.com]
[video credit: dariusctc (via YouTube)]
[source: Face.com, Vizi Labs]

Immense technical knowledge and computational power? iPhone has an App for that.

You know, if computers ever take over the world, it’s not going to be through a super smart spaceship like HAL, or a global network like SkyNet, or even Asimov-defying robots. No, it will be the iPhone. Those little handheld gadgets, not even the most popular smart phones, by the way, have so many insane applications that they’re getting dangerous. They can control your bank account, fly military drones, and now they even have access to the data and calculation power of Wolfram Alpha. Built off of their API, the Wolfram Alpha iPhone App lets you find visual answers to computational and statistical questions. What’s the rainfall in India like? How do I mix cyanide in water to get a 3 molar solution? Now you, or your Apple overlord, can find these answers on the go.

Wolfram Alpha, though trailing in popularity since its debut this summer has continued to impress us with the range of its technical knowledge. Sure, for the casual user, finding the population of North Dakota is as easy in Wikipedia, Google, or Yahoo as it is in Wolfram Alpha. But what about the hyper tangent of three times pi? Or the rate at which GDP has changed in Belgium over the past 23 years? As an open resource, the internet is evolving. Yes, we’ll always be able to get celebrity gossip, but as WA and other technically impressive sites evolve, so too will the level of available expertise. If we choose to use it.

The Wolfram Alpha iPhone App runs almost exactly like the main site, with tweaked templates for size, and keyboard input. Similarly, the API that Wolfram released allows users to augment their own websites with Alpha knowledge without drastically altering the landscape of their page. This ease of access, both in the App and the API, could really renew interest in Wolfram Alpha. However, at a price tag of $50, I wonder if Wolfram is targeting their iPhone App to high-end technical users (engineers, scientists, psychologists, etc) rather than the general public.

Maybe it’s just bad marketing. As cool as WA may be, I don’t find myself using it very often at all. When I do, it’s often to play around rather than find desperately needed information. Still, I admire the technical prowess of the site, and there’s no doubt in my mind that at some point this sort of expansive knowledge and computational database will be necessary and popular. Maybe after Wolfram Alpha goes out of business, but what can you do? In the meantime, enjoy the API and try not to let your iPhone become sentient. Kill All Humans? Please tell me there’s not an App for that.

[photo credit: Wolfram Alpha]

Fat Secret's new API is up and running.

One day we are told that eating fats makes us fat. The next day we learn that carbs are made from pure evil, and that fats are angel tears. It’s hard to keep track of all the nutritional information that is constantly bombarding you from TV, print, and the Internet, but up and coming website Fat Secret is willing to try. It has been compiling information from the USDA, users, and brands to form a comprehensive database for everything food and exercise related. Earlier in August, Fat Secret launched their free API, set to allow almost anyone access to their data for quick and easy reference. It’s Wikipedia meets weight loss and it could change the way we perceive nutrition.

Fat Secret is onto something. We desperately need a resource that reviews, consolidates, and analyzes nutritional information. Not just because such a resource would be trustworthy. The open access, the ability for any website to provide a link and retrieve the correct data, is a valuable tool which will help everyone from doctors to dieters. Right now, who can you ask if you need to know the calories in a cup of almonds? Do you trust that source? If I jog 10 miles one day, how much more food should I eat? Can you find that answer quickly?

Well, Fat Secret is certainly trying to be that all-in-one destination. They’ve even taken it a step further and expanded into social networking. Users can register and share recipes, dieting information, and fitness tips. There are online tools, such as weight tracking calendars, that can be exchanged or posted to a group. Those groups include people on the same diet, or trying the same fitness challenges. All in all, it’s pretty much what you’d expect from a nutrition website, and resembles most of what Body Trace was hoping to accomplish with eScale, though without the hardware. And Fat Secret does it for free.

Creating a reliable nutritional database that is accessible to anyone is a monumental task. Fat Secret’s approach is to separate their API into two flavors: a general API for those developers, users, etc who want to access the data, and a separate entry for those brands looking to enter their information. While having a different door for the likes of Coors and SlimJim seems a little like dietary apartheid it keeps a tight reigns on the doors of the database.

Which is a HUGE difference between Wikipedia and Fat Secret. While both are aiming to be definitive web resources, Fat Secret has a team of experts checking everything in their database. Which is exactly what you want in a database that you hope to trust and rely upon. There is still some user editing and updating, but most of data you see on Fat Secret is gleaned from the USDA or the brands themselves.

As the US shifts from an illness focused to a wellness focused health care system, nutritional information will be at a premium. Naturally, we will want a hub for that data, and Fat Secret might fill that position. I worry, however, what will happen if brands keep their separate access to what would become a universally trusted nutrition source. There’s sweatpants-sized room for abuse there. Hopefully Fat Secret will work tirelessly to keep their data unbiased, free, and comprehensive. Because if they won’t, someone else will. Wolfram Alpha is certainly a strong contender.

Freely accessed and trusted data is the currency of our generation. You, enlightened Singularity Hub reader, could utilize that free data to help you take advantage of the secrets of longevity. Personally, I’m sticking to my simple diet of polyunsaturated angel tears.

The new Lego display lets you see how a toy will look when built.

Like mushrooms after a rainy day, Augmented Reality (AR) is appearing everywhere. AR technology, which allows recorded and synthetic images to be blended and viewed in real time, is established in smart phones, marketing strategies, games, and entertainment. There’s way too many for us to discuss them all, but I thought you might like to see some of my favorites. Check out a whole slew of videos after the break!

Maybe the most important trend in AR is that, while it gets a lot of press in the US, it’s not really based on this continent. Total Immersion, one of the leading AR firms, is French. Layar, a Dutch firm that works with AR on mobile phones is mentioned below. If you’re using AR technology you’re more likely to be speaking Dutch or Korean than English. Which just goes to show how global the AR trend really is. Luckily for Americans, these companies are multinational and seeking to bring the insight and success of local developers to the world.

Welcome to the Layar Cake

Layar is set to revolutionize the way that you use your smart phone. The Amsterdam based company created an API to allow developers to create their own “layars”. A layar is basically a layer that can be applied over the image you see through your phone’s camera. That layer will include notes that indicate important things in your field of vision. Click on a note and learn about what you need to know: restaurants, hospitals, transportation, whatever you want. Each layer provides its own insights into your world.

By focusing on facilitating other developers in their layar scheme, Layar has helped create a really diverse catalog of filters that you can now view online. The catalog just went live on Aug 17th and is still a bit slow, but there are some amazing layars to chose from. You can use your phone to see information on real estate, social networking, temp agencies, banks, health care providers, or even the nearest automatic defibrillator. Each layar is geographically specific, so a developer has to be based (or interested) in creating a layar for your area. That may seem like a drawback, but I think it will lead to localized and customized layars that are based on realiable personal experiences. Check out a layar developer, Brightkite, in the following video:

For now, layars are only available on a few phones. The T-mobile G1, HTC Magic, and other Android phones can install the application. The company also plans on bringing the technology to the iPhone 3G S soon. Almost any phone that has a GPS, camera, and compass could support the application, so we may see Layars becoming much more common very soon.

Games, and Marketing, and Magic, Oh my!

Augmented Reality conquers table top gaming.

The gaming industry is huge and continuing to grow. We’ve already seen how one video game is hoping to utilize AR to fight zombies. Frantz Lasorne from L’Ecole de Design in France has another approach: turn your toys into table top gladiators. Similar to popular franchises like Warhammer or Heroscape, Lasorne’s AR game allows you to enjoy a scale battle on almost any flat surface. Simply put on some head mounted displays and you’ll start to see your action figures holding weapons and ready to move in turn-based combat. Check out the video:

AR may allow you to find new life in old toys, but what about selling those new toys in the first place? Lego is rolling out new boxes into retail outlets in the Netherlands. These devices will allow customers to place the box near a camera and see what the fully built toy will look like. AR lends itself to eye-catching marketing schemes, such as the one we saw for the movie Coraline:

But a real innovative space for AR may be in traditional entertainment. While green screens and CGI may seem stuck in movies and weather reports, the versatility of AR may allow it to access TV, and stage performances. I was impressed with Marco Tempest’s approach to an AR magic show. It’s a good twist on a classic form of entertainment and it shows how AR could be a real boon to performers who are willing to experiment with the medium:

Of course, the biggest draw back to AR is that you need to have personal access to a screen in order to experience it. We all don’t travel with a HMD, a computer, or even a smart phone. That’s starting to change though. As viewing technologies become more ubiquitous, the opportunities for AR will grow in kind. Utilities like Layar could replace or augment websites like Yelp or Craig’s/Angie’s List, and the marketing/entertainment portion of AR will have greater potential. Overall, I think we’re moving to a world where everything we look at will have associated digital information. See a car you like in a magazine? Photo the page and you’ll be on your way:

As I said, there’s way too many AR companies and videos for me to mention them all. So you do it! Leave a comment with a link to some of your favorite examples of AR. If you’ve used any of these devices in person give us a micro-review. While you’re at it, maybe someone could explain this one to me? Enjoy:

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