Computers are really, really good at recognizing faces. Refined through work on millions of uploaded and tagged faces at sites like Facebook and elsewhere, algorithms that identify faces can place people in locations based just on a photograph. Sometimes that’s helpful, like figuring out who that obscured groomsmen is in the back of a wedding picture. For people who don’t want to be found, or just enjoy the previously unquestioned ability to travel without being tracked, facial recognition poses a risk. As a solution, Japan’s National Institute of Informatics (NIII) created glasses that make faces unreadable to machines.

First question: will fashion accomodate the technology? It’s hard to conceal a face when it requires a style of glasses that no one else is wearing. Two previous prototype made by NIII used either near-infrared light or reflectors to fool the cameras into not seeing a face, but they looked super dorky. Check them out below: