Meta has patented a system for its smart glasses that would use facial recognition to identify people in a wearer's field of view, record clips when those people do something notable, and stitch the results into an automatic highlight reel, according to a filing published Thursday.
404 Media, which reviewed the patent, reported that the described system detects who is in frame, captures a clip when an identified person performs an action such as picking up an object or moving through a room, and then assembles highlight files from those moments. One scenario laid out in the document involves capturing highlights from a dinner party and presenting them to the wearer afterward.
An analysis of the filing reported by Gadget Review said the system would also track facial expressions and use eye-gaze data as a signal for which people the wearer finds interesting, then filter the compiled clips by relationship proximity. That analysis said the design is written to generalize beyond eyewear to phones, headsets and other camera devices.
Meta wrote in the patent that although the filing addresses particular camera-based tasks performed by a particular system, it also contemplates assisting users with any suitable camera-based task by any suitable system, 404 Media reported. Patents frequently do not become products, and it is not clear whether any of the described features will reach the company's glasses.
The filing lands amid sustained criticism of Meta's facial recognition ambitions. WIRED reported in June that the company had quietly added facial recognition code for its smart glasses to millions of phones, and 404 Media reported that Meta removed the code shortly after the discovery. Earlier reporting by The New York Times described an internal effort, known as Name Tag, that would let wearers identify people and pull up information about them through Meta's AI assistant.
Privacy advocates argue that bystanders cannot meaningfully consent to being recorded or identified by someone else's eyewear. Dozens of rights organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, have warned that such a feature would let wearers put names to strangers around them in settings including protests, medical clinics and businesses.
Responding to earlier congressional scrutiny, a Meta spokesperson said the criticism was based on speculative reporting about a product the company had not launched, and that it was weighing a number of options. Meta has continued to expand the product line despite the objections.