Facebook has recently been occupied with the development of a pair of AR glasses which falls under the name of Project Aria. The social media outlet will use Project Aria to train its AR perception systems and assess public perception of the technology.
The AR requires a number of sensors to work which could only function if cameras are deployed to see what the glass-wearer usually sees; accelerometers determine orientation, and microphones hear what everyone around the glasses is speaking.
Facebook’s intention behind developing Project Aria is twofold. First, the company wants to gather data for AI training. Second, it also wants to access the public’s perception and concerns about technology.
Aria does not come with any displays; it, in fact, is a pair of sensor-rich glasses that are designed to gather information from its surroundings, and the data will later be used by Facebook to train AR perception systems, which, in turn, will allow other AR glasses to understand the world around them to provide information to the user.
According to Facebook, Aria will help them in developing the safeguards, policies, and other things to govern the use of AR glasses and other futuristic devices to come.
Facebook will begin testing the device in the real-world starting this month. It certainly encroaches upon the privacy of the users and those around them, but Facebook has assured its users that they are taking privacy concerns seriously and that it has taken steps to protect the data from the very beginning.
The data gathered will be secure by using encryption and a secure ingestion system to upload the data from the device to Facebook back-end storage systems. The data stored could only be accessed by approved researchers. Before the data can be used by the researchers, the data will first enter the quarantine zone for three days within which the user would get to choose to delete segments of the data if they wish to do so.
The data gathered from the public places will be scrubbed to blur faces and vehicle license plates. Lastly, Facebook mentions, “The research glasses do not use facial recognition identification technology, and we don’t use this data to inform the ads people see across Facebook products.” Facebook says that Aria is not a product that Facebook will release to the public, but that it is only for testing to develop AR perception systems.
