Last July TAT (“The Astonishing Tribe“) posted a concept video of their augmented social face-card system (okay, I made that term up, what else should we call it?).  The video tickled the imagination with over 400,000 views.

TAT has since teamed up with Polar Rose, a leading computer vision services company, to turn that concept into a reality.  The TAT Cascades system combined with Polar Rose’s FaceLib gives us this prototype called Recognizr.

It’s nice to see the technology is coming together, but I wonder how the social and ethical repercussions will play out.  My guess is the only way this will truly work is to be paired with one of the big social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn.  That way you have your protected status built into your social information.

But then it becomes less useful for business or conference settings, which is where I see the biggest use (and as they demonstrated in the concept video.)  So if the access to your information connected to your face is customizable and controlled by you, then it probably won’t cause too much heartache.  Hopefully, we’ll see a real product from them soon.  Having the Recognizr system available at ARE2010 in June would be fantastic.