When writing an issue of Faultline with a deadline of April the 1st we have to be doubly careful about any items which are announced today, and we have applaud the efforts of those clever people at Opera for inventing (not really) a browser which uses facial expressions for control.
Two thoughts immediately leapt to mind ‘ one was that Opera needs to fix its browser to that we can call use it with all web pages ‘ something that is a constant frustration to us at Faultline, because we’re forced to load cumbersome old Internet Explorer in order to get at sensitive banking apps. The other was an old apocryphal story about US Air Force pilots who had their brains wired into the missile system so they could just ‘think’ fire and the missile was away. The project was scrapped because no-one could ever ‘stop’ themselves from thinking ‘Fire,’ with the resulting imagined carnage.
There is already something called TiVo thumb (through overuse of the fast forward button) and now we may soon see Opera twitch. The habit of zooming pages in and out with our faces might make half the population look like blowfish. In fact this April fool has probably managed to do that already. Bookmarking a page was supposed to involve a ‘licking motion’ like you are planning to make love to the screen.
When you click to download the new Opera version with facial gesture control, the system says that it is already installed and tells you to press F8 to calibrate. Assuming that this April fool is NOT picked up by everyone, a few million people this morning spent a very silly ten minutes winking and shaking their heads at a web page ‘ with fairly poor results.
Here’s some of the comments that gave the game away from the Opera announcement.
‘Face Gestures is compatible with most types of facial hair and haircuts. But if your face is covered with more than 25% of facial hair, recognition errors may occur. Please note that handlebars and goatees are compatible independently but if combined recognition will decrease. At the moment soul-patches crashes the browser and it refuses to relaunch, we are looking into this problem. Bushmen beards and emo haircuts are not supported.
‘Users visiting Web sites that contain adult content sometimes make unconscious facial expressions. If Opera keeps opening Speed Dial and Zooming In and Out, please be aware that this not a bug. It may be useful to disable Face Gestures for a better experience. Also remember that wiping your cache is recommend after visiting untrusted websites.
And finally ‘For compatibility reasons Face Gestures auto-detects financial news services and disables itself. The current version of the recognition software is unable to adapt fast enough to the sudden change in the users expression map. As soon as the new version is available you will be prompted to install stimulus_package.patch.
We particularly liked Zoom in which is achieved by sucking your cheeks in and zoom out by blowing your cheeks out. The comedic value of the video at YouTube is considerable, especially if you imagine these expressions being used inadvertently by people who don’t get the joke. Go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkNxbyp6thM