Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses

7 hours ago

The companion app for Meta's smart glasses, Stella, contains a fully assembled but dormant on-device facial recognition pipeline.
Three face models (detection, alignment, embedding) are present, along with a local database schema and a cosine-similarity vector index dimensioned to match the models.
The pipeline can run end-to-end, detecting faces, generating biometric embeddings, searching a local index, and firing a notification when a match is found.
Unrecognized faces are staged to disk as cropped images and embeddings in a directory called NameTagsPending, creating a dataset of biometric records.
A user-facing 'Connections' widget exists in the APK, but is not visible on stock accounts, and the notification's deep-linked screen is missing from the build.
The system is functional but not currently active for ordinary users, with enrollment data and server pushes not observed on test accounts.

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