The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is the federal agency responsible for issuing US patents and registering trademarks.
In the files of l’USPTOthe website Business Insider discovered a strange patent called Mechanical Eyeball, filed by none other than the giant Facebook, which has been working on it for several years. Just the fact that it has been accepted by the Patent Office indicates the progress of the bionic eye project.
Human-looking, Facebook’s mechanical eyeball has two axes of rotation that intersect at a central point to operate with the same precision of normal eye movements. The other components of the eyeball such as the retina, cornea, pupil and iris are also reproduced there.
This robotic eye would not be used to replace the loss of an eye on a flesh-and-blood subject, but rather as a means of vision for an equally robotic head, but of human appearance, as can be distinguished on the patent drawings.
USPTO
The mechanical eye in more detail
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Such a robotic eye could be used for several applications. For example, this eyeball could more accurately track the movement of the human eye in the development of augmented reality and virtual reality applications that rely heavily on eye tracking – techniques of capturing and analyzing eye movements to determine where a person is looking.
From there to the dreams and ambitions of the metaverse dear to Facebook, there is only one step.
Prosecuted in Texas
Speaking of machine vision, Facebook’s facial recognition technology is in the Texas attorney general’s sights.
Hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake in this case first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
The pursuit alleges that the company’s use of facial recognition technology, which it has now abandoned, violated state privacy protections regarding biometric data.
The latter alleges that Facebook has stored millions of biometric identifiers contained in photos and videos uploaded by users. The attorney general says Facebook leveraged users’ personal information “to grow its empire and reap historic windfall profits.”
Last November, Meta (Facebook) announced that it was ending its facial recognition system on its social networking platform and that it would no longer automatically identify users. More than a billion facial recognition (RF) patterns that were used to train and improve its RF and artificial intelligence technologies will be removed.
In addition to covering up its practices, the prosecutor alleges that the users did not know that Facebook was disclosing their personal information to other entities which then exploited them.
From there to the nightmares to the Big Brotherthere is also only one step.
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