No doubt, anyone of us has experienced the following situation – we see someone on the subway or on the street but we can't quite remember who they are. But now, Recognizr – a new technology from the Swedish firm The Astonishing Tribe (TAT) could soon be able to help us figure out who they are so that we can greet them by name.

According to an article published Tuesday in Popular Science, Recognizr is a new application that can figure out who someone is – it only need a photo of the person and a quick tour in social networking information about that person. (See how here)

Riffing on the growing field of augmented reality, the magazine called the technology "augmented identity” (Augmented reality is a term in computer researches that explains a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are augmented by virtual computer-generated imagery).

PopSci describes the innovative technology as a alliance “between face recognition technology, computer vision, cloud computing and augmented reality with the complex digital lives many of us lead on the Internet”. In fact, the magazine summarizes that TAT has created an app that allows users to gather information on a person and their social networking life simply by pointing one’s personal camera phone at their face.

On the one hand, this is pretty scary. On the other, it's hardly surprising if you've been following the natural progression of technology over the last few years. Facial recognition technology has come a long way, supported in part by the casino industry's aim to know everything about everyone who comes into their establishments.

Not long ago, a company called Riya built a technology that could identify faces and objects in sets of photos and then pick out the same person or object in sets of photos. That company was later purchased by Google.

Of course, being able to pick out who someone is based on no more than a quickly snapped photo is an advertisers' dream, even if Recognizr seems to take some steps to protect privacy. As PopSci put it, "Where social networks go, advertisers and other, more invasive data-mining schemes are sure to follow. But privacy issue be solved – you can choose to refuse uploading photos and avoid the chance to be recognized by Recognizr.

Recognizr is said to be compatible with the iPhone and Android, though no publicly available apps are available for either platform.