Meta Patents AI Glasses to Use Facial Recognition to Identify People, Make Highlight Reels of Your Dinner Party

Meta has filed a patent for smart glasses that would use facial recognition to figure out who is in view, then build video clips when those people do things like pick something up or move around. The system could then stitch those clips into a highlight reel, with one example in the filing showing a dinner party being turned into a curated recap for the wearer.

The patent, published Thursday, offers a more detailed look at where Meta may be headed with its AI glasses and its push into facial recognition. One illustration includes the prompt, “I’ve generated some highlights of tonight’s dinner party. Would you like to see them?” along with thumbnails that appear to show people laughing. Another part says the system may personalize highlight files using “user relationship data.”

The filing goes deep on the mechanics. A camera-equipped system takes input from the user, then uses machine learning and “sensory data” to identify points of interest in the frame. That can mean spotting people “based on one or more facial recognition algorithms,” identifying them, reading facial expressions, using “eye gaze data of the user captured by the client system,” and finding other points of interest through “scene and semantic understanding.”

The illustrations show a wearer looking at a group, then the glasses focusing on specific people. Patentlyze, which tracks patents, first flagged the filing to 404 Media on Friday. And while Meta’s language frames this as a camera task for a particular system, the company also says it “contemplates” helping users with any suitable camera-based task in any suitable way. That leaves room for more than just glasses, even if Meta hasn’t said what ships next.

None of this means the feature will end up in a product. But it does show Meta is still pressing ahead with AI glasses after plenty of criticism. In June, WIRED reported that Meta quietly added facial recognition code for its smart glasses to millions of phones, then removed it after the report. Meta didn’t respond to a request for comment.