All sorts of chorting, laughing, crying and pounding of a head on a desk with this one.
Far out. I just…. Well, you know me, takes a bit, but honestly, I’m a little bit speechless…..
https://www.engadget.com/2017/04/27/what-amazon-gets-out-of-putting-a-camera-in-your-closet/
Years ago, if someone told you she was buying a camera for her bedroom, you’d imagine she was planning something naughty. But times have changed, and Amazon believes you’ll spend $200 on a camera that’s both an extension of your smart home and the ultimate fashion accessory. The Echo Look is designed to help you look your best every morning, guiding and improving your style every time it’s used. But what it represents, and what Amazon gets out of it, could be a much bigger deal for the future of fashion.
Echo Look resembles pretty much every other smart home security camera you’d care to find, but it’s not about protecting your property. The unit is designed for fashionable types who like to document their daily outfits and make sure that they’re always looking good. Look comes with a depth-sensing camera, bolstered with four LEDs that turn even the dingiest bedroom into a half-decent photo studio.
If you take a selfie in a full-length mirror before leaving the house each morning, then the Echo Look is its modern-day replacement. Rather than holding a phone across your body, you can simply speak and ask the device to take a picture for you. The unit is voice activated and comes with Amazon’s chatty computing platform, Alexa. In addition, the depth-sensing camera will automatically blur the background to hide how messy your place is.
Chunk of quoted text yeah, but I warned you, I am speechless with this one.
Clearly, I am not the target audience for this thing, but I am not sure that’s even my point….. You are putting a web enabled camera in your bedroom/bathroom/change room/wardrobe…… What were you thinking? What did you expect was going to happen?
Ok as if we are over that fact and have moved on… Here is why you are going to do it…..
The other half of Echo Look’s sales pitch is Style Check, a feature that builds on the company’s Outfit Compare platform to keep your “look on point using advanced machine learning and advice from fashion specialists.” Simply submit two snaps of you wearing different outfits and the system will tell you which one looks best. It does that by crunching what’s trending, what fashion experts are saying, how well it fits you and what colors are in season.
AI. Yup. You are going to ask a computer how the outfit looks.
Now, see, this oddly enough I am comfortable with… Blokes the world over are tired of the trap question ‘Honey, does this outfit make my butt look big?’ This clanger is right up with the whole, which of these 6 dresses should I wear out today?
Clearly Amazon knows we blokes are tired of this game and have programed a computer to take our place. Sweet.
But, every share comes at a price;
Amazon is, of course, storing every single one of those images, along with hundreds of pieces of contextual information. That data will be constantly crunched not only to understand what style suits you but also what outfits you pick depending on weather, mood or season. In addition, the information will be used to train a machine learning system that can offer better suggestions for every Echo Look user.
Every image is stored. Every. Image.
Did that sink in?
See, that’s the thing with machine learning, you need to feed it data, lots and lots of data…. Topic for another blog.
I have already taken up enough of your time on this one, but the article goes on to talk about AR, where you can try on virtual outfits and see how they look in a monitor/mirror. Yeah, you guessed it, AR is another blog topic…..