Want Facial Recognition With Google Glass? Use Google+

In case you haven’t been reading Facebook or Google+ lately, I got my Google Glass Explorer Edition this past week. You can expect me to share much more of my experiences here as I learn about it. One of the most frequently asked feature requests I see surrounding Google Glass is that it would be awesome if it had some sort of facial recognition included. We’re seeing apps like MedRef that make facial recognition (sort of) available for medical professionals, but the question still remains, will we get to have it built in? Well the answer is it’s actually already there – if you turn it on in Google+.

In your Google+ account settings there’s an option to notify you if someone “Shares a photo or video with me that I might be in.” Enable that and even set it to send you an SMS when it happens. When someone takes a picture of you via Google Glass and shares it to Google+, it should notify you. Approve that, and now they know who you are.

Of course, it’s a bit of a hack, and the person you’re taking a picture of must be using Google+ and have this enabled to work, but it is a way to know who you are taking pictures of. So if you get Google Glass (when it’s available to the masses), and you’re taking pictures of people via the device, be sure to share it to Google+. Maybe if you’re lucky they’ll get notified that their picture was taken, approve it, and now you’ll have a tagged picture with their name on it.

It’s definitely not ideal, but this at least does suggest that it wouldn’t be very difficult to make facial recognition a more integrated part of Google Glass. Let’s hope by the time most of you use it you’ll get this functionality by default. In the meantime make sure you’ve got a Google+ account!