Castle Paradox

[AJHunter]

I recently became interested in stuff where computers recognize stuff and learn stuff. So this random idea popped into my head while I was reading a tutorial on augmented reality in Flash: a program that would recognize the user's face, store the login information securely, and log that person into different things automatically. Oddly enough, this idea which, if I try it, will lead to countless hours of work and would cost more money than I have ($29) stems from my laziness: I'm too lazy to log in manually!
Now, this poses an interesting problem: will I get around to doing this before someone patents it?
What do you think of the idea, and how do you think I should go about doing this?
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*snap*
*wink*
*finger-guns*

[Bob the Hamster]

What you describe is a Facial recognition system, which is a specialized type of machine vision.

It is pretty cool stuff, but there probably isn't much in the field that hasn't already been patented. I just used the search engine at http://patft.uspto.gov/ and found hundreds of patents that mention "facial recognition" (although most of those are probably for specific uses of it)

[Bagne]

I'm fairly certain that something like what you're describing already exists.
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Working on rain and cloud formation

[AJHunter]

So what your saying is that I'd have to pay for the rights to use someone else's stuff to make something that probably already exists? I may need to get into kickstarter.com.
I was hoping it would be pure open sourcery, but I figured that a lot of the stuff in facial recognition would be patented. As for origionality, this is really just me wanting to learn something really awesome that I could probably use in the "real world", what ever that is.
_________________
*snap*
*wink*
*finger-guns*