iPhone 5 May Feature Facial Recognition

It seems that there is some chance that the upcoming iPhone 5 (and perhaps the iPad 2) will feature facial recognition technology.  This idea come’s from Apple’s 2010 acquisition of a Swedish company called Polar Rose – a company known mostly for their mobile face recognition technology called FaceLib.  Of course, this is all still speculation, but I for one hope that we’ll see something come of this.

This new technology, of implemented, could take one (or both) of two roles as I see it.  First, a security role, in which the iPhone can use your face as it’s lock screen pass code.  Secondly, this could be extremely useful for tagging photos, or adding adding name captions to videos.  In the future, I can even see this used to benefit augmented vision systems.  Any contacts that you have photographs of could be instantly retrieved from your contact list, and their names and certain other information could be displayed immediately.

Hell, with awesome augmentation systems such as these glasses from Vuzix, this could happen sooner rather than later.  I, for one, am crossing my fingers.

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