An MIT Media Lab team creates an app that is the world's first cloud-based technology for reading facial expressions. It began as an effort to help autistic folks who have difficulty reading emotion (or maybe just the male species) and it is now being commercialized to help businesses understand their customers
The MIT professor who oversees the lab with the face-tracking demo founded a spinoff called Affectiva last year to market this technology.
Commercial trials are under way on Affectiva's skin conductance sensors, wristwatch-size devices that detect emotional engagement by measuring tiny changes in sweat-gland activity.
The firm plans to make its facial and skin analyses available as a cloud-based service, allowing for massive opt-in studies of human response to videos, digital signage, and websites.
Watch the videos below in front of a webcam to see an analysis of your own smile and compare it to others…
