Fall On Your Face?

Many of you may be aware that this week the government in their ‘infinite wisdom’ have decided to trial a facial recognition system at Manchester & Stansted airports. Lets have a little look and see why this is a pointless endevour to “add another layer of security and not repace existing systems”.

A test on this scale is normally to work out any final bugs out and produce a final system that will then be rolled out across the rest of a network. There will be a few problems with this for our beloved UK gov.

To start with, facial recognition technology has NEVER been accurate, throwing up false-negatives and false-positives so this appears to be as much a test of the technology as it is of the security system and as far as I can tell it is based on existing technology. Concerns by the Biometrics Assurance Group (pdf) [show] that there is still work to do on both the facial recognition standards and the format in which facial images are stored.

This means the government is committing to a system upon which there are NO standards to adhere to, basically making this a very risky operation. Considering the biometric chip in passports may be incompatible with other systems, or at the very least when a standard is agreed UK residents with the chipped passports may end up having to get yet another passport. Normally standards are agreed before any large-scale testing goes ahead so this seems rather fool-hardy.

Now lets consider people who have gone before. There have been many tested applications of facial recognition and nearly all have been scrapped after only a few years in service as they proved impractical and inaccurate.

“Boston’s Logan Airport also ran two separate tests of facial recognition systems at its security checkpoints using volunteers. Over a three month period, the results were disappointing. According to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the system only had a 61.4 percent accuracy rate, leading airport officials to pursue other security options.”

If this is supposed to be another layer of security, to augment the already ludacris systems that are in place, then passengers will see no benefit at all. Did I mention that the whole process will be overlooked by securities staff who can step in at any time and take you to a real person to match your picture.

If all goes well and the system works then it will be truely remarkable and may indeed speed up entry through immigration. However, I feel that given the problems many people have with technology the so-called speed may be just an illusion, a target, similar to the fiasco at Heathrow Terminal 5. Not to mention the fact the system may fall flat on it’s face irrispective of whether people can use it. I predict an amalgation of both which will troublingly create some of the longest queues, the opposite of the desired effect.

Wii Spacial Tracking

Nintendo has revealed a new accessory for it’s Wii console called ‘MotionPlus’ which adds a new level of tracking for the Wii remotes. This accessory “…lets the Wii register the exact position, angle, and movement of the controller and translate it to a game”.

Sound familiar? For those of you who are aware of Johnny Chung Lee from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, you may remember a year ago he posted a video on YouTube with spacial head-tracking for better 3D immersion into a virtual reality environment. Watch the video below and let Mr Chung Lee explain it for you.

So is this the kind of thing that Nintendo will be introducing? I imagine it will be some variation of it considering that the sensor is an attachment for the Wii remote itself and not directly in line with the user’s line of sight with the TV.

Just one more thing to set the Wii apart from the competitors who seem so intent on copying the motion detection technologies just for the sake of it and not with any real purpose.

Welcome Back Gort!

I was just having a browse through Apple’s film trailers as I normally do and I was taken aback by a film titled ‘The Day The Earth Stood Still’. Considering that the 1951 film of the same name is one of my all time favourites I was hoping that this would be a remake rather than a completely unrelated film. To my delight it turned out that it will be a remake but now the problem is whether they will do the original justice or make a hash of it instead.

The original film was based on a book by Harry Bates called “Farewell To Master” and the film obvioulsy uses some creative license and includes things not spcifically in the book and also leaves out something at the end (Gort reveals he is the master and not Klaatu). The 2008 remake is rumoured to follow more closely to the book but should be a pretty accurate representation of the original film set in the present.

As sci-fi films often reflect the current social / political climate showing the hopes and fears of that generation it is no surprise to find that the film is about escalation of violence and what the consequences of that hold considering the times at wich the original was made. The original film was made after WWII and the remake will be released with the war on Terror being at its most prevailent.

I am looking forward to this (released December 12th) but I feel that it won’t be quite as good as the original but should be visually stunning. Oh and Keanu Reeves stars as Klaatu.

What Do You Mean?

Microsoft has recently purchased Powerset, a small company that deals in semantic search engine technology and released a proof of concept through Wikipedia. The principle is inline with other Microsoft Live Search goals, which is moving searching beyond matching mere keywords and phrases but actually understanding the meaning and the context of the search terms.

The possibility is that people will be able to ask a question and get a list of results based upon what the question relates to even if the best match doesn’t contain the keywords. This would probably never happen but it gives you an idea as to what can be accomplished. It means people get results more in common with what they are actually looking for and not just a bunch of web pages that happen to have the same keyword. This could revolutionise the internet but I fear that Microsoft’s proprietary attitude will undoubtedly lead it to be less than it could be.

The reason Google is so successful is that it is simple and quick. More recently Microsoft has attempted to emulate this with its Live Search which I must admit is quite good, but is no where near as good as Google’s. One good thing about the semantic search might be the removal of search results that are just putting your search query into another search engine… VERY ANNOYING.

Will this sematic searching bring them to the next level? Possibly, but I am left wondering what the next level for the Google search will be. It seems as case of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it’.

Smart Bracelets or Electronic Tags?

Reading an article on Slashgear about a new creation from Continuum Studio I couldn’t help but wonder what similarities their new ‘Smart Bracelet’ has to a criminal electronic tag.

The principle is exactly the same. You put a bracelet on your child and you wear the master which alerts you when they have moved outside a certain radius that you set. It then shows you exactly how far away they are and in which direction. Now I am all for children’s safety and this sounds like a brilliant invention that I’m sure will do well with concerned parents who want to let their children play but also want to know where they are but I just can’t shake this image of a child in a prison outfit running around with a bleeping tag on their leg.

What happens when the child learns that they can just put the bracelet on their dog ’spot’ and let him run around outside the perimeter fence driving their parents mad thinking they’ve lost their child. “They should be right in front of me!” … leading to

“Oh my god the dog has eaten the children!”. It also reminds me of when you lose your phone and have to press the page button on your base station at home so the handset beeps allowing you to find it. Could this work with the prison children? I can just imagine concerned parents pressing a button and a loud noise goes off in the distance with their child trying to cover it up because if anyone hears it they are sure to get teased for being so cool (Sarcasm implied).

The trouble is, where do you draw the line? At what age to you stop wearing it? As everybody knows, parents never stop worrying about where they’re children are and if they’re safe. Should I be wearing one? Should everyone? What about when my parents get too old to look after themselves, does the system come full circle and I start to tag my parents in case they wander off unaccompanied?

Its all very ‘Logan’s Run’…

Just Buttons Moved Around?

Adobe have released betas of some key apps due to be released as part of CS4. I hope that performance has been improved and some interesting new features added because I’m really not a fan of trying to figure out how to do something I know how to do in CS3 but can’t in CS4 because they’ve moved the toolbars!

I wonder how long until a cracked version appears on the net. I say 24 hours from release.

Cam-Trax ‘Any Object Interface’

Normally when you hear about tracking you just assume that it’s a very expensive piece of kit or a highly sophisticated algorithm. Well Cam-Trax is sophisticated but with its simplicity.

The system allows you to control anything you like by tracking an object’s colours. You will understand when you watch the video below. It seems very apt considering we are all experimenting with tracking in some form or another at the moment.

Scribbles Will Survive The Paperless Revolution

It seems everyone is getting on this paperless band wagon these days. Only yesterday I wrote about the new A4 sized E-paper developed by Epson.

Well today folks its Wacom (made famous by their drawing tablets) in partnership with E Ink announcing they have made a pen input e-paper.

They are describing it as “the ultimate version of an interactive piece of paper” and I agree, its all very well to be able to read books or newspapers on e-paper but its the scribbles that make paper what it is. The ability to take a pen and paper and create anything you like is why we love it so much. Paper is one of the most versatile piece of kit that we have and so can’t be easily replaced.

I can’t help feeling that while we have the illusion of moving forward with this technology we are in fact taking two steps back. Is it not the goal of technology to make improvements on the past, to make more things do… well more things? At the moment it seems that when we finally hit the paperless society, instead of having one piece of e-paper that can do everything actual paper can do, we’ll have a huge range of e-papers for specific tasks.

Paperless Paper

I was reading through my RSS feeds as I so often do and I came across this article which made me realise just how far we have come and how little we need to go to become a completely paperless society.

Epson have been developing electronic paper for a while now, previously producing a 7″ display, and have now shown off their A4 size piece of paperless paper at SID 2008. If just oogling the papery goodness of this isn’t enough for you then the specs are as follows: Resolution is 3104 × 4128 and has a contrast ratio of 10:1 which is supposed to replicate the look of actual paper. “The…electronic paper was developed by combining electrophoretic electronic ink of E Ink Corp and a low-temperature polycrystal Si-TFT of Seiko Epson”.

The company say they are in their “final stages” of developing the technology and are getting ready to start user-testing to develop the product for commercial use.

I can’t help wondering how long it will be before we see a Minority Report style newspaper which updates with breaking newsand display animations while still having the consistency of actual paper.

My best guess to make that work in a practicle sense would be to buy only one paper and pay a subscription to update it each day. That way you only buy one paper and people won’t litter they’re cool, new, high-tech e-paper.

It does beg the question though… with paperless paper… who needs an Epson printer anymore?

Stem Cell Research Support Urged

I was very excited today ot hear that Gordon Brown has publically and unequivically urged his support for stem cell research by writing in The Guradian. This is a major milestone in support for the research and all I can say is “About bloody time”.

In his article he says that he respected those MPs opposed to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill ‘for religious reasons’ and I agree, a religeous imperitive against the research is a difficult one to overcome but it’s the people who say that we would be killing the unborn foetus that I ahve issues with (which I won’t go into here).

I have strong views on this because of the wide reaching implications of perfecting stem cell treatments and have been annoyed about the arguements that surround the issue. It is only going to take one person to go the distance, as we all know you can’t close Pandora’s box.