Airport Using Google Glass For Security and Passenger Information 36
An anonymous reader notes this story about how an Amsterdam airport is putting Google Glass to use. "One of Europe's busiest airports, Amsterdam's Schiphol hub in the Netherlands, is trialling Google Glass for use by airport authority officers as a hands-free way to look up gate and airplane information. It's also testing Google's face computer on travelers passing through the terminal in a bid to better understand the 'customer journey', thanks to Glass' first person perspective....Google has pulled back on 'Glass for the masses' — at least for now. It shuttered its Glass Explorer program last month. Although far from killing off Glass, it has handed the project to Nest's Tony Fadell to oversee. Glass lives, as a standalone division within Google that's yet to prove its worth — but which Google evidently isn't willing to give up on, even though it's been forced to have a rethink about its go-to-market strategy. And, in all likelihood, the entire product proposition/design of the hardware."
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It is being expanded and turned into its own division.
No, it's being pinched off like a dingleberry. If it ever bears fruit because someone else takes an interest and does something with it, they'll parade it about and sing its praises as if they've always believed in it.
All of the suckers who bought one (at ridiculous prices) have nothing to show for it and have been cut off from any and all further development / revisions.
The only ones with access to it going forward will be Google and whatever company decides they want to pay Google $BIG_MONEY$ to get thei
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The only ones with access to it going forward will be Google and whatever company decides they want to pay Google $BIG_MONEY$ to get their hands on it.
And just like Dean Kamen's "it", anyone who knocks one off in their garage for peanuts. And also just like that particular "it", it's not changing the world because it's not new, just a refinement of things which already existed and which anyone could have told you wouldn't change the world if refined a bit.
Wearable computers with cameras and HUDs (however primitive) were around before Glass, Hololens and others are coming, and there will be more in the future. They're inevitable now that they're cost-effec
A proper use for the technology... (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, this is something I'd assert is a proper use for Google Glass -- a way to help improve workflow. I can see this being useful not just at the airport, but for bank tellers and other retail staff. It not just is a way of presenting info, but if something bad does happen, it is a way of helping prove who did it, especially if it takes place out of the arc of the overhead CCTV cameras.
This is a lot better use of the technology than trying to cam at the local Alamo Drafthouse.
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And this is something I've always said, Google glass is not something the masses even want right now, however it would be really useful as a work tool. I can certainly see this technology being useful for nurses, paramedics, police, and many other working professionals.
Maybe after people get used to it's abilities at work they'll find a want/need for it outside of work, but that's in the future, the workplace uses could exist right now.
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Google engineer: But...how can we make Glass more appealing now, as a way of sowing seeds for our next release?
Tony Fadell: Give them to airport screeners. Everybody loves those guys! And why not? They're hip, edgy, rule-breakers!
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And bouncers. Facial recognition automatically identifies banned patrons. Video record proves they checked ID. Video camera verifies IDs from out of state / country.
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The article mentions using facial recognition, so I assumed they had something working.
As for IDs, I just mean spotting fakes by checking the tell-tales. These days, when a bouncer gets an ID he's not familiar with, he has to pull out a book and look it up.
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So they are using the supercomputers to play minesweeper then? The interface/terminals are 20 years old but I assure you the workload is handled by a state of the art system/s.
example you can get a basic out the box ID system for your PC, it takes my computer (i7 16gb ram with solid state drives) about 3 minutes to ID me from a list of 100 photo's, imagine how long it would take if the list was 10 million.
And vegas isn't a good example anyway, most of the casio's have phased out facial req because its so un
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Google does all the heavy lifting on servers, for Glass and pretty much everything else that they do. The Glass just collects data and displays the results. It has barely any compute or storage, just enough to be a client to the web services, really. That's how they got it small, light, and relatively cheap (compared to previous similar devices).
Retinal scanning is great, but the goal is to ID people from a distance, so that the observer is just wearing Glass and watching a stream of people. If they're doin
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What is the advantage over a camera mounted on the wall? The battery life of video recording on those things is like half an hour. "Yea man, can you pass me my 10th pair of glasses?"
Cops (Score:2)
The police, or at least the people police report too, are going to love these things. The devices will replace at least three other devices, the personal radio+mic, the body camera and the in-vehicle computer console.
I expect to see every cop in the US wearing these inside of five years. For better or worse.
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I expect to see every cop in the US wearing these inside of five years. For better or worse.
And my eyeglasses have super-bright IR LEDs embedded in them, too.
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Spot but dificult to phtogragh with a digital cam. It would likely kill any chance of face recognition.
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Time to start over (Score:2)
even though it's been forced to have a rethink about its go-to-market strategy
And here is the example that every other frelling company out there needs to learn; if people don't want to use your product the way you expect them to you need to change your expectations. The classic demonstration of this is the Ford Edsel, but there is no lack of newer examples, such as why did MS go forward with Win 8 even after the test users uniformly hated the new interface? Ballmer had decided that users were going to c
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Exactly! Pretty much no startup succeeded with their initial plan intact. The trick is to be agile yet decisive, which is a hard balance. You have to listen to the market and find an opportunity that "clicks", but at the same time you can't redirect every week.
I'd say that Google realizing that consumers don't want Glass, but enterprise customers do, is a pretty reasonable redirect. For another example, look at Apple - they change their minds about things based on market demand. They thought larger phones w
This would be fun to hack (Score:1)
Not that hard either, just use the NSA backdoors in the protocol and hijack the streams
Then their GGs would show a nice little old lady going thru security instead of the actual person.
Or maybe show they have credentials for pass thru.
For every solution, their is a workaround.
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Then their GGs would show a nice little old lady going thru security instead of the actual person.
GG isn't AR. You could pull that trick with the MS holo glasses, but not GG. At best you could hack the "terrorist warning" to "VIP priority" when the back-end identifies the terrorist.
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Depends on the feed protocols. Would be far easier to change the text and color displays, and have the headset send back an "override: incorrect identification" message back to the system. This "clears" the subject long enough for them to proceed and confuses, due to high levels of mismatch. Any system without such overrides would be non-functional, due to real world constraints.
Basic application of social engineering - find the most common override that shuts or delays the security and use that. Don't upgr
Better hack (Score:2)
If all of the airport personnel are wearing Glass (or something like it) you could have a real life Metal Gear Solid kind of "zone of vision" for all the airport security. Makes getting that bottle of water through security a lot easier.
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Fairly easy to do that already, though. Problem is people try to take the whole bottle in one unit, which shows up as a vacuum area on the scans. If you switch to flat or tubular bladders, you can use shoes or purse handles or briefcase handles or backpack parts to move the same amount of liquid.
Hilariously, Hololens looks more meaningful (Score:1)
All the complaints about how hololens isn't holographic and just has a holographic prism or whatever aside, it seems like it's actually more like the thing I want. And I only want to use it when I'm driving, really. No real privacy implications there, nobody seems to be railing against dashcams.
Google Glass and Alzheimer's (Score:2)
So... (Score:2)
We're not that far away already... watch this! (Score:2)
From Black Mirror, a great series on Netflix and also in-full on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]