This would be good for someone like Penn Gillette, who can literally never remember a face, even his parents.

Alternately, you could decide to not look like a jackass, and just remember pertinent information about your friends.

I mean, hell, I already don't have to remember anything I learned in high school or college. What am I going to be doing with my hippocampus, anyway?

One things for sure... Wearing that ridiculous contraption, they'll sure remember you.

I guess maybe forgetful professors with lots of students might make good use of these, but I would never want to be friends, or even acquaintances with someone who needed those to remember me. Unless it was like a brain damage situation, but that's different.

I would just have it run a continuous feed of internet porn. It would last all of 2 minutes before I walk off a subway platform and kill myself.

@Garrison Dean, King Awesome: Give it time... in a few years, it'll be a contact lens. And nobody will even know you're wearing it. It's coming, sooner than you think!

@BullfightsOnAcid: What would be good is if it recognized people's faces and then searched for Internet porn featuring those people... if your friends and acquaintances had ever done porn, your glasses could be showing it to you while you talk to them.

@Charlie Jane Anders: Taking that a step further - for all those people who have a fear of public speaking... You could eventually have glasses/contacts that render everyone in your field of view as if they were naked. Likewise, you could go the other way and write some software to erase all the camel toes.

I understand that this is a protoype/demo and that what we're supposed to think about is the potential it will have in teh future. And, yes. I would totally have these.
When they're released in a non-jackass edition.

Thing is, we're gonna need a bran modification to go with these, since there is going to be so much information avaliable and the possibility to zoom with one eye while the other scans the Net for info and I'm thinking that our generations brains are just going to go *pop* and burst something vital and then...we're going need these. As suggested above.

@Charlie Jane Anders: The idea of pulling instant information through the internet has already begun to kill the human brain's ability to hold information due to the fact that we can access it at a moments notice if need be. The idea of us similarly slowly killing the brain and our eyes most basic function of recognizing and processing the world around us is quite frankly, terrifying.

I'll put it in terms you can understand. In 100 years time when humanity would be totally wired to this, a giant UFO comes out of the sky, aliens walk off and the global camera system sees them and shruggs and says... "Well thats new one, don't look at me!" and the aliens proceed to wipe us all out because we had contacts in.

Throw in GPS and they can project potential bus routes on whatever corner your standing on, telling you where the next bus is, the traffic congestion that lay ahead, ect.

I initially read that headline as Smart Googles... which come to think of it is an even better invention. They can connect to the internet and give you information about, uh, everything.

@Charlie Jane Anders: ...and it'll map that pr0n over their real-time bodies as you idly converse about last night's Colbert Report.

Teh Future > Sliced Bread.

Thats so...silly!
Ill take two!

And then you can hook them up to MyFacebookFlickrSpace and know who everyone is without having to talk to them.

And TSA will do the same, but with a less useful database like the no-fly list.

Does it also display whuffie scores?

Those prototypes are only a set of headphones away from being part of Harrison Bergeron's outfit. Talk about a whanging headache.

I'll take mine in a horn-rim.

Didn't Gizmodo show this thing than a month of ago?

@Metropolis: What's Gizmodo?

@Metropolis: I actually searched and didn't see it on Gizmodo... so, no. Plus nobody's really talked about the face recognition aspect.

@Metropolis: Probably, but look at it this way. Most of the stuff on here won't be on Gizmodo for another 50-100 years at the soonest.

@Katana_Mind: While I agree with you on some points, I must admit, Bran modification made me laugh. Call the grain surgeon. (Ba-dum-tsh)

However, you wouldn't have to do EVERY task at once. You wouldn't have to have a conversation while you look up recipes for tomato bisque and enter the stats of the person you are staring at while trying to find your keys. You can focus on one at a time.

WARNING: Random tangents are both fun and disturbing to follow. Try and keep up.

And if one task doesn't demand too much attention, like listening to Aunt Muriel's vacation stories, you can swap to looking at the aforementioned hardcore internet pornography. Eventually you won't even need the pornography because of the association that will form. You will start calling Aunt Muriel and asking questions about her vacation. And tugging the tie.

Transhumanism has to start somewhere. Increasing our RAM, faster running speed, the obsesssive need to remember everything one ever did! I wouldn't bother wearing this stuff, but I'm glad there are those who will, because they will drive the market to develope smaller and less conspicious brain amplification ware like this.

Check out this animé from last year, "Denno Coil", all about Augmented Reality glasses.
[en.wikipedia.org]

Remembering the folks you meet isn't enough. It would have to google all relevant data about everyone you've ever met and come up with effective conversation topics or pickup lines for said people. :)

@Metropolis: It might have been more than a month ago, but they had the glasses, but didn't go into the facial recognition (that I remember), just the object finding capability.

@choinski: We can do that already here in Seattle (City of the Future!). I can check where all the buses are and get live traffic cams from my phone or laptop.

@Signal: That gets me thinking, do we actually NEED to know all this stuff? So what if I forgot someone's face? If something is really important I'd remember it. And there aren't many things worth remembering. Most of it is just trivia.