Jeffrey Mo

6th Period
Orcam’s Myme Uses Facial Recognition to Remember Everyone You Meet
January 17, 2019
Summary: This article details OrCam, a camera that uses facial recognition AI to help visually
impaired individuals remember and recognize faces. By attaching the device to an individual’s
shirt, device is able to remember faces with faces. The product is similar to a past product that
the company had made in the past, MyEye, which had the same functionality but was an add-on
chip for glasses. The article further describes the process of MyMe, indicating that the product
uses “face recognition and optical character recognition” to help the product process and store
image data in the cloud. It is important to note that the technology of MyMe, though helpful,
requires consent due to the constant camera surveillance. In the second section of the article, the
author transitions to the process of making MyMe available to the public, indicating that the
product originated from KickStarter. The author finishes his argument by informing the audience
of the price of the product. This product will be available for $399 in January 2020.
Project Topic Connections: This article will be extremely helpful in my research as it examines
the role of artificial intelligence in optometry. MyMe, a successor to MyEye, is extremely
helpful for those who are visually impaired, which my research also aligns with. The goal of my
research is to help those individuals who are blind or impaired through the help of artificial
intelligence. The artificial intelligence network (neural network) used in this type of technology
is a convolutional neural network (most probably) which uses a series of matrixes that, in a
sense, classify objects based on their characteristics (this assumption is based off of the “facial-
recognition algorithm”). Doctor Pope introduced me to MyEye a few weeks ago which peaked
my because the product that they had created was extremely similar to the product that I am
playing on creating. Although the products are fairly similar, the type of neural networks
involved will be different. The type of neural network(s) that I plan on using is a convolutional
neural network combined with recurrent neural network and a self-organizing map. Overall, the
products will yield the same effect but the product I plan on creating will make a map that plots
out specific points that are popular in human vision.
Personal Response: While reading this article, I had a mix of emotions. The first emotion I had
was curiosity. At first, I wasn’t sure how the company managed to record a video, sort the data,
enter the data into the cloud, process the data, run the data through the network, and get results in
such as short amount of time. However, after checking my resources on AIs, I found that the
principle behind the product was fairly basic. Though I’m still not entirely sure how MyEye
holds all the data in the cloud with such as small battery, I’m more or less satisfied with the
conclusion that I had come up with. The second emotion that I had during this article was shock.
The initial shock stemmed from the idea that convolutional neural networks could be run at the
same time as data flowing in, but more probably, the network would run in intervals in the cloud
database and transport the data via a wireless signal to the camera. I’m not quite sure how similar
this product will be to my own, but the core principles will be the same.
MLA Citations:
Dillet, Romain. “OrCam's MyMe Uses Facial Recognition to Remember Everyone You
Meet.” TechCrunch, TechCrunch, 17 Jan. 2019, techcrunch.com/2019/01/17/orcams-
myme-uses-facial-recognition-to-remember-everyone-you-meet/.