You'll never have to remember anything again!

Mar 14, 2008 15:51 GMT  ·  By

If you have problems remembering where you lost your 45 million dollar laptop, you should probably consider buying a pair of these weird-looking glasses. The Smart Goggles have the ability to remember where you last saw a particular lost item. This way, you can behave like a borg, have the memory of a borg and look like one as well! The device has a camera attached to the glasses, a small computer and an LCD display which can also identify unknown plants and faces. One problem though, if you have really bad problems with your memory, try not to lose them, the chance is you will never find them again!

Inventor of the device, professor Kuniyoshi of University of Tokyo, says he believes that with the help of the Smart Goggles people will have the capability of surpassing severe memory problems, usually associated with old age and diseases such as dementia.

The camera is fitted on the right lens of the glasses - as seen in the picture - and can film mostly everything the bearer observes. The collected data is immediately sent to a computer capable of recognizing the shapes of multiple objects. To film a space area such as that of a house usually takes about one hour or so, so that the computer learns the objects in order to provide a quick information when a specific item needs to be found.

The learning process is assisted by the bearer of the device, that has the role of focusing the camera on the objects and name it out loud, which is then stored in the physical memory to be retrieved later. Once the learning process is over, the glasses are ready for use. The names of the lost object is displayed on the LCD screen, after which the glasses will try to find it. If it does not succeeded in the first try, the next attempts will have greater and greater probability of finding the objects, at the same time giving the Smart Goggle the possibility of learning and improving themselves from the mistakes.

Additionally, the technology could bring valuable advancements in robot development technology, related to image recognition, or it could be used as an educational tool while trying to learn the names of unknown species of plants or animals. Remembering people's names? No sweat! Smart Goggles are relatively efficient with finding lost things, however the problem is that once an object is moved from its original position, the device becomes useless. The race is now to minimize the camera and viewfinder, so that Smart Goggle will become more fashionable in the matter of looks and size in the years to come.