So you’re out shopping for clothes and you notice that one of the store’s facial recognition-equipped mannequins appears to be spying on you. The Stealth Wear hoodie you just bought will protect you against drones, but is powerless against these bots. What do you do? You pick up a pair of Japanese professor Isao Echizen’s “Privacy Visor” glasses, which promise to thwart any software that’s trying identify your face (unless you’re already rocking Stealth Wear creator Adam Harvey’s counter-surveillance makeup, that is).
The glasses work using small near-infrared lights, which are visible only to cameras but distort your features enough that recognition is impossible. They’re a relatively bulky prototype for now, requiring a pocket power source to operate, but Echizen says he’s working on streamlining them. “We are developing an improved version of the privacy visor without power supply consisting of transparent materials that reflect or absorb specific wavelength,” he recently told Slate, adding that the final version will cost “around $1 per unit” to produce.
