ENLIGHTEN3D

By Joshua Koopferstock

“I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!”  Who could forget this classic tag line for a wearable safety button that gives you a direct line to an emergency response operator, in case, well, you’ve “fallen and can’t get up!”

Modern technology, however, is working toward a more elegant and unobtrusive solution to this problem.  In this first Crystal Ball Feature, I will be exploring future applications of human crowd tracking and action recognition technologies we have recently covered in our posts.

“I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!”

Let’s begin with applications for safety.  Attach a computer that recognizes action to a simple video camera surveillance system, say, in an assisted living home, and you have built yourself an automatic “I’ve fallen and can’t get up” response system, no button pressing required.  Or, install a similar system at pools and beaches to aid overworked lifeguards by providing them a technology that literally can watch hundreds of people at once.

Move over to the entertainment side of things.  What casino manager wouldn’t be interested in computers that can automatically detect cheaters?  Even a system that only worked a fraction of the time may serve as a deterrent, and security companies have already created facial recognition technologies that compare players’ faces to those of known cheaters.

Sliding from the business of entertainment to your own personal entertainment, recognition of human actions will eventually make video as searchable as text is now.  Major players in the high tech industry are working on this problem as we speak.  Want to zoom to that specific dance in your wedding video?  Just tell your computer to find “red dress tango” and it will search through the tags it has automatically created for each frame or scene.  And since we’re on the topic of entertainment, it would be unfair to completely ignore one of the most common uses of the web, adult entertainment.  You don’t need me to elaborate on how video search could be valuable to this industry.

I would not want to be a lifeguard here. Photo by snappybex.

Lastly, one considerable application for retail will be in-store consumer recognition and tracking.  Retailers want to know everything that consumers see and do in their stores.  They already have ways to track how many people come in and out, what products they buy, and even test what they look at on the shelves with eye tracking.  In the future, technology will allow retailers to unobtrusively track a consumer’s every behavior from the time they enter the store to the time they leave and automatically understand every action the consumer has taken, as seen by the in-store video system.  With all this happening automatically, the retailer will be able to analyze and dig through this data to discover consumer trends that we cannot currently understand due to the time-cost of tracking and tagging methods.

That’s as far as I look into my crystal ball for today.  If you know of technologies that already exist that do what I’ve talked about here, leave a comment and impress us all!  Or reach into the back of your desk, pull out your own crystal ball, and tell us what you think the future of these technologies will bring.