When Google Glass is finally launched it should help create a wave of innovative apps that wouldn’t work as well with a phone or some other device (like a watch). I think there will be a lot of “killer apps” for Google Glass that will make people want to get one, even if they have a smartphone, a tablet and even a smartwatch. It should have a lot of different use cases that will make it worthwhile to buy one.
One of these such apps is being developed by Duke University, and is being part-funded by Google. The app is called InSight, and it’s supposed to identify people by the cloths they are wearing, based on its “fashion fingerprint” recognition system.
The fingerprint can be constructed when that person is looking at their phone, reading their e-mail or browsing the web, and then creating a file, called the “spatiogram”, with the colors, texture and patterns from the cloths the person is wearing. To protect people’s privacy, this fingerprint can change whenever you’re changing your cloths.
“A person’s visual fingerprint is only temporary, say for a day or an evening,” says Nelakuditi.
This sort of technology could be useful for identifying people you know in a large crowd, even when they aren’t facing you, and tests have shown it can do that with an accuracy of 93%, but also people you may not know personally but you have to meet, making it much easier to find them.
It could also be used by blind people or people with other conditions that make it hard for them to identify the people they know. A blind person wearing Google Glass would not only be able to get Google Glass direct them through Google Maps, GPS and voice, but it would also help them recognize the people they know from afar, before they even get a chance to say something.
The InSight app is only the beginning of what we will see for Google Glass. There are already plenty of great ideas for apps for Google Glass, but when a lot more people start to actually wear them, the amount of ideas for it should explode, and we should be able to see a lot of innovative apps for Google Glass.
[Via NewScientist]