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New “Privacy Glasses” protect your identity and your image

Protecting your privacy can be a difficult task in today’s world of information technology. With surveillance cameras on every corner and a recording device on every smartphone, there’s a good chance your image has been captured somewhere without you even knowing it. Safeguarding your mug in the future is set to become even more difficult with advancements in facial recognition technologies and wearable computers like Google Glass.

So what can you do to ensure your identity remains intact? In Western countries the answer would be simple: put on a pair of sunglasses. In Japan, however, sunglasses are a much less common sight, and many consider them to be worn only by those trying a little too hard to look cool, and in more extreme cases associate them with the yakuza lifestyle. Researchers at the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo have addressed this issue by designing a non-threatening pair of white shades to protect both your identity and your public image, dubbing them the “Privacy Visor”.

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High-tech glasses provide near-instant translation of Japanese text

Although major cities in Japan have installed signs in both Japanese and English, many foreign travelers still face difficulties reading the text found on things like menus, product packages, and billboards. That may all change thanks to NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s largest mobile phone operator, and their new glasses that are capable of almost instantly translating Japanese text.

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Can you understand me now, Google Glass? A Japanese perspective

By now, you’ve surely heard about Google Glass, the head-mounted computer that allows the wearer to interact with data while going about their day thanks to a tiny display that hovers in the top-right corner of their vision. While this all sounds like a wonderful little slice of the future, the product has come under scrutiny recently amid privacy concerns raised by politicians, and many are wondering about the possible implications of using it in the real world.

While most reviews have been from the perspective of native English-speakers, today we stumbled upon an interesting review written by a Japanese speaker. Despite the country being considered by many to be the home of computer wizardry, Japanese people are often a little shy of new devices at first (the iPhone was positively ignored for its first year on the market), so we were keen to get a Japanese perspective.

Just a couple of paragraphs into the writeup, however, we noticed that the reviewer had stumbled upon a couple of minor problems with Google Glass.
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