Unidentified Halo — Becca Ricks
Unidentified Halo
Unidentified Halo (2016) was a collaboration with Shir David reflecting on a pervasive surveillance tradition and using facial recognition in public areas. The challenge is a wearable within the type of a hat that’s meant to protect the wearer from facial detection on surveillance cameras by making a halo of infrared gentle across the face.
We imagined the wearable as not solely a speculative piece, but in addition an anti-surveillance device that may very well be worn by anybody on the road to guard their privateness.
The challenge started as a subversive “equipment” of wearable gadgets that may subvert the gathering of delicate biometric knowledge. We mentioned the thought additional with a number of engineers at NYU they usually steered that if we had been fascinated about combating facial recognition algorithms, we might create a wearable that shines infrared gentle on the consumer’s face.
For our preliminary prototype, we soldered collectively 22 IR LEDs which are powered by a chargeable 500mAH lithium battery and monitored by a potentiometer, after which adhered the circuit to a baseball cap. The LEDs are wired alongside the invoice of the hat and the battery is tucked into the rim. We agreed that the hat shouldn’t require technical know-how and the battery may very well be simply recharged.
In brief: the experiment was profitable. The picture beneath was captured from a surveillance digicam to which we had entry at NYU. You’ll be able to’t see infrared gentle in individual; it is just seen on digicam.
As you’ll be able to see, the digicam picks up a hoop of sunshine across the wearer’s face. The infrared gentle consequently prevents Google’s Cloud Vision platform from detecting a face. Once we ran the pictures via Google’s platform, it not solely detected Shir’s face however even provided recommendations of her emotion based mostly on facial indicators. My face, however, went undetected.
Press protection: The Christian Science Monitor