I’ve written in the past about our Human Computer Interaction (HCI) investment theme at Foundry Group and have mentioned our portfolio companies that fit into that theme: EmSense, Oblong and Smith & Tinker.

Well, pictured above is a delightful faux-advertisement I discovered via Thomas Dolby’s blog. I had the pleasure of meeting Thomas years ago (back in the Beatnik era) and then again around 2006 when he returned to the music world, and spent some time rehearsing for his tour at my friend Heidi Roizen’s place in Atherton. Thomas started blogging a while ago and I’ve been following it with great interest since. He’s moved back to the UK and has been working on a new album, which I can’t wait to hear. He is recording in a studio he built into an old retired boat that is sitting on his property that has a view of the sea, which seems to me a brilliant and delightfully wacky enterprise, and strikes me as a quintessentially English sort of thing to do.

Anyway, this ad was created by the folks at Status Graphite guitars, and it seemed to fit into my fascination with all things related to HCI, even if it is, sadly, not yet a real piece of gear. It is now on my fantasy product wish list.

I’ve been playing around with the face recognition feature in the newest version of iPhoto, and I’m pretty impressed with how well it works. And with how well it fails. I went through the process of confirming/teaching iPhoto to recognize me on photos where it had assigned a high probability that a photo was me, but needed my confirmation to be sure.

I know most face recognition systems start with identifying the size and shape of and spatial relationship among eyes, nose, mouth, etc. What I found to be interesting was the false positives the system delivered. When a picture it thought was me wasn’t me, probably 75% of the time it was an immediate family member: one of my parents, one of my brothers or my son. So clearly there is some amount of facial geometry that members of my biological family share. I wonder if other iPhoto users out there have noticed this? Hmm, maybe iPhoto could conceivably be used as a poor-man’s paternity test, or it might lead someone to discover they were adopted…

What was also interesting was that for the remaining false-positive identifications of me in my photo library, most of the rest were confined to four of my closest male friends: Sam Chambers, Scott Derringer, Martin Reinfried and Jason Mendelson. I’m not sure what to make of that. Are we friends because we look like one another in some subtle way that isn’t obvious to me? Or is it just statistically-likely noise since I have relatively more photos of them in my collection than other folks who appear from time to time?