From New Scientist:
In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, the eponymous subject
keeps his youthful looks while the vagaries of age are visited upon his portrait
in the attic. Now a digital version of Wilde’s idea is being developed to show
you what you will look like in five years’ time if you take no exercise, eat too
much junk food and drink too much alcohol.
Initially the system acts just like a sophisticated "mirror" in which an
image captured by a wireless camera is displayed in front of you. But that is
just the start. Its main purpose is to conjure up a computer-modified image of
the effects of overindulgence at the press of a button, says Accenture lab
director Martin Illsey.To do this the computer builds up a profile of your lifestyle, using a
network of high-resolution cameras dotted around the house. These webcams will
feed images of your everyday activities to a computer running software that is
able to recognise different patterns of behaviour.Once the computer has built up this profile, a different software package will
extrapolate how this behaviour is likely to affect your weight in the long term.
If the computer feels you are eating too much, it will calculate how many pounds
to add to the image of the person standing in front of the mirror.