Saturday, August 20, 2011

Off Label Use


There is an iPhone application I have been playing with of late, seen here. It augments your reality, presumably with extra reality, in the form of the amount of calories are in your food. In short, you provide a picture of said food, and it comes up with an estimate of the caloric content.

Naturally, I set out to try to prove that a 99 cent app can't possibly predict the essence of food as well as I can. At first, I started out with food, then food hidden by other food (Big Mac under a layer of saltines), then things that aren't food, and finally pictures of people that most certainly are not food (as depicted above).

Frankly, I'm no so much bothered by any inaccuracy, but by the fact that it is perfectly willing to make guesses on anything you put in front of it. If this thing ever gets into my facebook photos (or becomes SkyNet)... well that's a grim future where we're all just tens of thousands of calories to our reality augmenting overlords.

Side note - I was just thinking that if you couldn't read the words, the above drawing might look like some bizarre ad for vegetarian or vegan eating. Which made me think, are vegan babies allowed to have breast milk? What about the adults? Who is the authority on this?

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