At the risk of sounding grumpy, this is not someting that should be in a browser IMO. Browsers have become monstrosities that only a few giants can maintain, by including everything and the kitchen sink.<p>Face detection is a perfect example of what should be a plugin. I'm not saying it has to be a horrible old school NPAPI plugin. It could be a sandboxed app, it could be a WebAssembly library, and so on.<p>Edit: nothing against the OP's post, it's probably cool although I cannot test it on this PC :-)
Google really is pushing forward what browsers do - I am not sure if that's a good thing. Especially in regards to privacy and security. Maybe they should separate browser from OS in some meaningful way. These capabilities should not be easily available in your ordinary web browser. Same with WebUSB that hackers can use to mount your USB drives and read data or eg. steal passwords from things like ubikeys... I know the analogy is a bit flawed, but it reminds me of all the power that Active X provided back in the day, when Microsoft tried to make the browser the OS.
What would normally be already somewhat creepy is amplified by the irony of having this appear at the same time as the several other items about SESTA/FOSTA/CLOUD.
This API is like 18 months old and super experimental, I don't think ever will land in official specifications. WebAssembley is here so is better to implement such things with it
Safari on iOS already has face detection. But I don’t think there is an API for it.<p>If you can’t see well and so enable VoiceOver, when a webpage opens the camera to take a photo the phone will what it sees, “like face in centre of photo”.<p>It’s very usefully for blind of partially sighted people to take selfies.<p>Here is a reference: <a href="https://www.apple.com/uk/accessibility/iphone/vision/" rel="nofollow">https://www.apple.com/uk/accessibility/iphone/vision/</a><p>Edit: added link
Draft specification is at <a href="https://wicg.github.io/shape-detection-api/" rel="nofollow">https://wicg.github.io/shape-detection-api/</a>