Isn’t it really annoying when you’re on your smartphone in a public space and out of the corner of your eye (or when your spidey senses start tingling) you notice someone looking at your smartphone’s screen. You make eye contact with them and they immediately avert their gaze in guilt.
How long have they been looking? What have they seen? Did they manage to take a look at that awful selfie you took yesterday before you deleted it from your gallery? Suddenly, you’re super self-conscious.
The good news is that that may not be a problem for much longer because a group of Google researchers have found the solution.
They’re calling it an electronic screen protector. It works by using your smartphone’s front-facing camera and eye-detecting artificial intelligence to detect when more than one person is looking your smartphone’s screen. From the demo video, when the camera sees someone looking your smartphone screen, it takes over and switches the selfie camera on, highlighting the face of the second person.
This software will apparently also work in different lighting conditions, poses, and can recognise when someone’s looking at your screen in 2 miliseconds. That’s more than enough time to catch them in the act.
What they’ve accomplished here is actually pretty amazing and is a surefire way to know if some stranger is staring at your screen. The Google researchers are set to present this project next week at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference in Long Beach, California.
When will this technology hit consumer devices? We have no idea, but it’ll definitely be an interesting alternative to those nasty privacy screen protectors.
What do you guys think of this? Let us know in the comments below.
