Networked Police - Facial Matching Glasses

Brazilian police have come up with a system to scan the faces of people in crowded areas, checking them against a central database to see if they're wanted bad-duded. I love this. Truly, these are like the grandpappy of the wearable systems from Snow Crash. It's a set of glasses with a camera fitted to them. The camera can grab 400 faces per second out of a crowd and send them all to a central database. If there's a match, a notifier pops up on a screen and lets the officer know that there is a wanted criminal afoot.

These systems are slated to be used for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Police will begin testing them at concerts and football matches soon. Standardly, the system is set to scan faces in crowds up to 50 meters away, but has the capability to recognize faces as far as twelve miles away. Wow. Systems like this will leave it up to the computer to identify perpetrators instead of the officers needing to ask for or call in documentation. This makes it more discreet for law-abiding folks to just enjoy whatever event needs such protection.

What consistently freaks me out about stuff like this is that this is the completely unclassified technology that is being talked about openly in the news. How much more is possible, or already happening? Creepy.

[via The Telegraph]