18.1.10

Exciterrifying - Augmented ID

The Astonishing Tribe (TAT) has a video up of a prototype of a system for your phone that excites and terrifies me. In essence, you point your phone cam at someone (with an account set up presumably) and it displays on screen a range of info from their social networking footprint.

I'm excited because it's another step forward in this amazing digital era we find ourselves in, where the concepts of knowledge and information are being radically reimagined every other day and terrified (ok, perhaps not that extreme but it worked well with my exciterrify portmanteau) because of the potential for evil it displays. When you think about it though, face recognition has been around for a while and who knows what the powers that be are doing with that tech. 

Or, in their words:

Augmented ID is a TAT concept that visualizes the digital identities of people you meet in real life. With a mobile device and face recognition software from Polar Rose, Augmented ID enables you to discover selected information about people around you. All users control their own augmented appearance, by selecting the content and social network links they want show to others. Modifying your augmented ID is easier than fixing your hair in real life and, of course, TAT Cascades will make sure you look great!