Facebook is investing a lot of time and money in augmented reality, including building its own AR glasses with Ray‑Ban. At the moment, these gadgets can record and share images, but what does the company believe these devices will be used for in the future?
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A new research project led by Facebook’s AI team suggests the scope of the company’s ambitions. It envisions artificial intelligence (AI) systems that continuously analyze people’s lives using videos of what they see, do, and hear to help them with everyday tasks. Facebook researchers outlined a range of skills they want these systems to develop, including “episodic memory” (answering questions like “where did I leave my keys?”) and “audiovisual organization” (remembering who said what when).
Αυτή τη στιγμή, οι εργασίες που περιγράφονται παραπάνω δεν μπορούν να επιτευχθούν αξιόπιστα από κανένα σύστημα AI και το Facebook τονίζει ότι πρόκειται για ερευνητικό έργο και όχι για εμπορική ανάπτυξη. Ωστόσο, είναι σαφές ότι η εταιρεία βλέπει τη λειτουργικότητα όπως αυτές ως το μέλλον του AR computing. «Σίγουρα, σκεπτόμενοι την επαυξημένη πραγματικότητα και τι θα θέλαμε να μπορούμε να κάνουμε με αυτήν, υπάρχουν πιθανότητες να αξιοποιήσουμε τέτοιου είδους έρευνα», δήλωσε στο The Verge η επιστήμονας του Facebook AI, Kristen Grauman.
Such ambitions have huge impacts on privacy. Privacy experts are already concerned about how Facebook's AR glasses allow users to secretly record members of the audience. These concerns will only worsen if future hardware releases not only record footage, but also analyze and transcribe, turning users into surveillance machines.
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The name of Facebook's research project is Ego4D, which refers to first‑person video analysis or «ego‑centric». It consists of two main components: an open dataset of an ego‑centric video and a series of benchmarks that Facebook believes AI systems should be able to tackle in the future.
The dataset is the largest of its kind ever created, and Facebook partnered with 13 universities around the world to collect the data. In total, about 3,205 hours of video were recorded by 855 participants living in nine different countries. The universities, not Facebook, were responsible for collecting the data. Participants, some of whom were paid, wore GoPro cameras and AR to record videos of their unscripted activities. This ranged from construction work to baking to playing with pets to hanging out with friends. All of the footage was edited by the universities, which included blurring the faces of those in attendance and removing any personal identifying information.
Source of information: theverge.com
