Like Nokia last week, Qualcomm has been talking up the future of phones, and the company gave us a sneak peek of what to expect a short while down the road: face recognition technology tied to social network search technology, so you can find out what a stranger just tweeted simply by pointing your handset at them. Is Facebook stalking about to get a whole lot worse?
We’ve seen in-picture face recognition start to appear in mobile phones recently, with Sony Ericsson promising the tech will make it into the Xperia X10 early next year. But Qualcomm reckons it’s going to get much more integrated and advanced.
Qualcomm Snapdragon tablet concept revealed
In a presentation today, the company’s European president, Andrew Gilbert, showed how you would soon be able to point your phone’s camera at a person, then instantly bring up their Facebook and Twitter profiles, along with recent updates and all the details said victim (Karmen, in the above picture) has chosen to make public about themselves.
Gilbert admitted that the possibility raised serious privacy issues – you could theoretically pull up a person’s home address through automatic whois requests – but ethics aside, it’s an interesting next step for augmented reality apps, which layer data over the surroundings and have started to take off in a big way over the last year. As phones get faster and more powerful, what’s to stop people integrating this form of search?
Gilbert described a future where the “handheld device becomes the remote control of your life”. If you ask us, we’ve already reached that stage – would you take it to the next level like this?
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[...] future products and facial recongition tied to social networking is one of them. Ben Sillis from Electricpig reports what the Qualcomm European president presented: the company’s European president, Andrew [...]