Get that promotion with this phone app that saves you from the embarrassment of having food stuck in your teeth! You’ll never believe you lived without it.

Background:

  1. Some new phones (and laptops) have the ability to detect an authorized user’s face and unlock the phone without requiring a PIN.
  2. Often, if you have something stuck in your teeth, people won’t say anything. Then, hours later, you realize that you had, say, a huge leaf of lettuce in your hair the whole time, forcing you to re-contextualize all your social interactions since lunch.

Proposal:

Surprisingly, although the capability certainly exists, no face unlock system currently informs users if they have, for example:

  • Something stuck in their teeth
  • A weird thing in their hair
  • Bizarrely smudged Joker-esque lipstick
  • A bird that has made a nest in the user’s hair

Figures 1 and 2 demonstrate how the “face unlock” feature could serve the dual purpose of notifying users of such situations.

lettuce.png
Fig. 1: The face unlock feature can informs this hapless user that they have lettuce stuck in their teeth.
lipstick.png
Fig. 2: Extraordinarily smudged lipstick might also be detectable via the face-unlock system, although the variability of lip shape may make this a more difficult computer vision problem. It’s a good Ph.D. project for some unfortunate graduate student.

 

lettuce-in-teeth
Fig. 3: This phone has high standards of dental hygiene, and will refuse to operate until you pick the lettuce out of your teeth.

Conclusion:

Since the phone already has the hardware to perform this public service, it would be a trivial addition to the standard face-unlock system. Note to Apple: you should pay me to license this incredible technology.

PROS: Gives the phone’s developer a leg up over competitors without robust lettuce-detection algorithms. It’s basically a free feature!

CONS: People might rely on the phone too much for even the most basic tasks, and civilization might revert to a barbaric age of inhuman savagery if there is ever a prolonged electrical outage.