The latest little treat to spurt out Swedish software house The Astonishing Tribe might concern those of you who were first in the queue to upgrade your Facebook privacy settings. It's a mobile app called Recognizr, which allows the user to point their camera at any person and find out who they are.

It achieves this by building a 3d model of the face of the person that you're pointing at, and sending that to a server. The server compares the model to a database, and if there's a match then the subject's name is sent back, along with links to their various social media presences across the Web, if they have them.

Given that there's no doubt tens, if not hundreds, of photos of you uploaded on the Web by your friends on Facebook, it's not too hard for a machine to combine those pictures into a relatively accurate model of your face, and then open that up to a recognition service. Thankfully, however, it's only planned to be an opt-in service. If you want to be discoverable, you have to choose to be.

The app isn't yet available, and only runs on the iPhone and the newest Android devices.

Via: popsci.com

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