The Brazilian police force is getting a little bit Terminator on its citizens. Well, on its criminals at least.
No, they haven’t built a humanoid killer, they’ve just taken a cue from the augmented, analytical sight capabilities of cinema cyborgs. In the next few weeks, Brazilian police will begin testing pairs of “RoboCop” glasses, which can identify a criminal’s face in a crowd of people.
“To the naked eye, two people may appear identical,” says Major Leandro Pavani Agostini, chief of military police in Sao Paolo. But these powerful shades can scan up to 400 faces per second, up to 50 yards away, using 46,000 biometric points to identify an individual and ensure a correct match.
Faces are scanned with a tiny camera in the glasses then checked against a database of known criminals. A red light pops up if a perpetrator is found, and the cop can apprehend them without the need for questioning or requesting documents.
The settings of the glasses are adjustable, so if a crowd is more sparse and spread out, it can identify faces as far as 12 miles away at a slower rate.
Rio de Janeiro will be host to the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games, so these “RoboCop” glasses could prove to be a very useful safety measure.Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.