In Oscar Wilde鈥檚 The Picture of Dorian Gray, the eponymous subject keeps his youthful looks while the vagaries of age are visited upon his portrait in the attic. Now a digital version of Wilde鈥檚 idea is being developed to show you what you will look like in five years鈥� time if you take no exercise, eat too much junk food and drink too much alcohol.
At Accenture Technology鈥檚 lab in Sophia Antipolis, near Nice in France, a flat-screen LCD TV linked to a set of cameras and a powerful image-processing computer replaces the portrait described in Wilde鈥檚 novel.
Initially the system acts just like a sophisticated 鈥渕irror鈥� in which an image captured by a wireless camera is displayed in front of you. But that is just the start. Its main purpose is to conjure up a computer-modified image of the effects of overindulgence at the press of a button, says Accenture lab director Martin Illsey.
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To do this the computer builds up a profile of your lifestyle, using a network of high-resolution cameras dotted around the house. These webcams will feed images of your everyday activities to a computer running software that is able to recognise different patterns of behaviour.
It will be able to identify, for instance, when you have spent most of the day sitting on the couch instead of on the exercise bike, and will spot visits to the fridge for snacks and drinks. Verbal or text prompts from the computer will ask you to identify what you are eating and drinking. Of course, how honest you are is up to you.
Adding pounds
Once the computer has built up this profile, a different software package will extrapolate how this behaviour is likely to affect your weight in the long term. If the computer feels you are eating too much, it will calculate how many pounds to add to the image of the person standing in front of the mirror.
Another package will work on your face. Too much alcohol? Expect early wrinkles and blotchy skin. 鈥淭echnology can be quite persuasive,鈥� Illsey says. 鈥淭here will be several options for the visual feedback the user gets, ranging from weight gain to modifying skin tone to increasing the shadows under the eyes.鈥�
Illsey hopes to have a prototype mirror completed by the middle of this year, providing the behaviour recognition and image processing software can be finished in time. The Accenture team wants the system to work in real time, to give the user a genuine sense of looking into a mirror and seeing the ghosts of today鈥檚 excesses being projected into the future.
Some experts predict it could have a high impact on users. 鈥淚t sounds like it could be very effective,鈥� says Alex Pentland, who works on smart environments at the MIT Media Lab in Massachusetts.
鈥淗elping people visualise the long-term outcomes of their behaviour is an effective way to motivate change,鈥� says B. J. Fogg at Stanford University in California, whose team has developed sunglasses that show the effect of too much sunshine on the skin.
Others, however, believe people will shy away from such an unflattering, nannying device. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 think any system which presents a negative image of the user will be taken up by many people,鈥� predicts Cliff Randell, an expert in ubiquitous computing at the University of Bristol in the UK.
