WATANI International
26 December 2010
By the time I was 5 feet away, the computer at MIT##s Media Lab knew I was intrigued. I had approached it with eyes widened, eyebrows raised, head tilted: the physiognomy of engagement. Now, with every mug I made, a monitor labeled me confused, impressed, absorbed.
The demonstration showed off the latest in affective computing, a research field attempting to teach computers to understand and adapt to human emotion. An affective system analyzes information from cameras and body sensors and compares the data to a model that accounts for different emotional states. An affective GPS car navigation device would respond with a soothing voice when it detects a driver is stressed. Movie studios could also use affective webcams to tell when a test audience starts to tune out of a trailer.
The foundations of affective computing were laid in the 1990s by MIT professor Rosalind W. Picard, who oversees the lab with the face-tracking demo. She and research scientist Rana el Kaliouby founded a spinoff called Affectiva last year to market affective technology that the two initially developed to help autistic children understand and communicate emotion.
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 and websites. Feeling it?
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Forbes
