wrongdistance.com

from FotoNation

OKAO Vision by Omron

Today’s Wall Street Journal had a story today about an Irish company called FotoNation which licenses software for digital cameras. This may be old news to the more gadget aware people but one of the technologies they have pioneered completely blew me away: it’s called Smile Detection.

“SmileCheck is a compact software module… It can detect more than 10 smiling faces that are a minimum size of 25 x 25 pixels. [It waits to engage the Shutter until all the faces are smiling”

I never knew that people not smiling in a photo was a problem that so many people needed to solve. This is almost more like an interesting piece of conceptual art than a gadget setting as it’s ripe with all kinds of interesting issues about the nature of memory and ensuring that our past is only filled with happy, smiling moments. It reminds me quite a bit of the idea behind Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where a man has all the unpleasant memories of a relationship removed from his head.

The Okao vision technology above is also amusing in its attempt to quantify happiness.

Not really but sort of related is a great column Douglas Coupland recently wrote for the Guardian about technology’s effect on the here and now which I found via the great Russell Davies :

“I remember in the 80s when cellphones first started to pop. I remember how, if you saw someone using a cellphone on a street, you immediately thought they were an asshole: gee, my phone call is so important I have to make it right here and right now! Twenty years later, we’re all assholes. We’re assholes at the supermarket’s meat counter at 5:30pm, phoning home to ask if we need prosciutto; we’re assholes driving in traffic; and we’re assholes wandering down the streets. And with cellphones and handhelds, we collapse time and space and our perception of distance and intimacy.”

We live in interesting times…