The Creepiest Thing to Happen to Dating

Did you ever think about how Google Glass could affect your dating life? With Glass and other augmented reality apps, creeps hitting on you at bars just might get a whole lot creepier. If the future of dating looks anything like this concept video from an Israeli software company, you should prepare for potential mates to be reading real-time information about you as you interact. The American Psycho-channeling video from Infinity Augmented Reality imagines what Google Glass-like products could soon enable, with specific emphasis on how they could be used to pick up strangers and hustle friends in pool halls. For instance, a camera might recognize a person's face and quietly pull up their Facebook profile. Meanwhile, it analyzes voice tone to rate "interest" in real time.

Maybe this video just isn't the best endorsement — "you could cut the date rapey tension with a knife," writes Mark Wilson at Fast Company. "Infinity AR’s mistake — and what makes this ad feel branded more like Dexter than Match.com — is that the interface is too overt ... it’s downright conspiratorial as the Internet serves as this guy’s wingman, digging through a woman’s interests like prey, plunging it into the uncanny valley of big data."

Buzzfeed's John Hermann described the video as "a near-future hellscape ... an ultimate fantasy according to…someone. Someone bad. Someone you probably do not want to meet or know." Sociopath-enabling potential aside, the augmented reality idea is just logistically confusing to me. I feel like either you'd have to be really clueless to not realize that someone was actively reading background information while engaging with you, or that person would have to be really practiced at it in a way that seems ... creepy. So maybe it's not just the video. Despite the Back to the Future II appeal of apps augmenting all the things, it seems like a way to further complicate and corrupt in-person social interactions.

Here's how Infinity AR imagines it. The pickup interaction gets going around 1:35.