Tech Desk 
Oct 08, 2024
Ray-Ban Meta glasses already reigning unchallenged in the realm of wearable VR technologies, but it's likely to be propelled to greater popularity with a meticulous round of modification carried out by a group of Harvard students.
Grabbing headlines, Harvard students incorporated facial recognition technology into the pair of Ray-Ban Meta glasses.
Since the integration of cameras has become an old-school offering on smart glasses, the remarkable feat has sparked concerns about security and data privacy, foreshadowing greater urgency offered by the Meta glasses.
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The concerns reached an even aggravated point through the involvement of the e-commerce and tech juggernaut Amazon with the backing of law enforcement.
Attributing it to the rising cost of surplus computing components, the retail giant recently raised the prices of its 24/7 monitoring.
Ray-Ban Meta glasses updated with facial recognition
A substitutional approach is also offered by a London-based startup named Plumerai whose expertise lies in minute AI technology to bring tasks like people detection and familiar face recognition on-device, suppressing the need to transfer data to remote servers.
“We’d have to worry so much just about the storage cost and the data transmission costs. We’re taking full frames. It’s a ton of stuff that we’re recording, but not recording on camera. I felt the weight of this all the time,” TechCrunch quoted Tony Fadell, the iPod creator and an early investor in Plumerai, as saying.
Plumeria CEO Roeland Nusselder was of the view that the startup has the potential to take away the biggest target audience of the smart camera market with its highly efficient, low-cost AI solution. “All of the AI features are from Plumerai, running locally on the camera,” he remarked.
