It is hard to avoid sounding vulgar, somehow, when discussing the future of facial computing. There is something inescapably crude, isn't there, about the prospect of everyone walking around with computers on our faces?

And yet I suspect the world may adopt face computers anyway, and not long from now, perhaps even within the coming decade. People in tech have long been wondering what might succeed smartphones as the next dominant computing platform. For a long time I've thought that nothing would - that phones would remain our primary computers for the foreseeable future. In the past few months, though, I've begun to face the fact that our faces are... in trouble.