Neven Vision

No doubt about it, Neven Vision is on a media roll lately.

Wired featured their facial recognition software for cellcams in its December 2004 issue, and now TheFeature interviews namesake Dr. Harmut Neven about his plans for “Hyperlinking the World”, visual Google style.

If Dr. Neven and his company have their way, we’ll all soon be sending cellcam pics to Neven Vision powered visual search servers. Example: Snap a photo of a painting and MMS it to his server. The server responds with information about the painting, maybe an audio-visual narration. TheFeature delves into some of the difficulties with constructing and searching a world size visual database, while the Wired piece focuses more on the biometric and security applications of the technology.

Whatever comes of this, I can’t help but think that the issue of whether or not we non-celebrities own our “public image” is about to be forced. I’m a big cellcam fan, but I don’t know if I’ll appreciate it when any cop or TSA employee (or city worker, or man on the street?) can snap my picture and within a few seconds know everything public there is to know about me. Privacy is about to take on an entirely different meaning.

Am I paranoid? Or concerned for good reason? Let me know what you think by leaving a comment.