Emotient's face-tracking Google Glass app can identify the mood of people around you [feedly]

Emotient’s face-tracking Google Glass app can identify the mood of people around you
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Emotient has announced a private beta of its facial recognition and emotion tracking tech for Google Glass, as well as revealing that it has secured an additional $6 million in funding.

The US-based company shared details of the private beta today, confirming that, for now, it’s only available to select partners and customers.

In essence, what the company does is use cameras to identify and process facial expressions and provide an emotional read-out that measures overall sentiment (positive, negative or neutral), primary emotions (joy, surprise, sadness, fear, disgust, contempt and anger) and more advanced emotions like frustration and confusion. It doesn’t really require any special hardware, for the demo we saw a run-of-the-mill Logitech webcam was used.

So, in this case, the wearer of Google Glass can simply fire up the app and have the emotions and sentiments of everyone around them displayed in their line-of-sight and fed back to the software platform.

In the demo, the recognition happens very quickly and has no problem dealing with more subtle expressions (like looking deliberately slightly sad) or very quick smiles, for example. While it’s easy to think of the one-on-one benefits this could bring, the app is really a proof of concept for Emotient – the ultimate aim is to get its facial tracking tech in all manner of different devices and services.

On one side of that equation you have a deal with Intel that will see the tech feature as part of the Intel Real Sense SDK and reach a far wider audience than it otherwise could.

“Intel Capital is our first institutional investor and they are also a customer of ours, our technology is going to be integrated into the upcoming version of its perceptual computing SDK – renamed Real Sense at CES. That will open up the capabilities of our technology out to all of the developer communities that are a part of its perceptual computing division,” Dr. Marian Bartlett, one of the co-founders of Emotient, told TNW.

To give an example, imagine the Virgin Atlantic staff wearing Google Glass being equipped with this software. Not only would they be able to recognize passengers, but they’d also have a pretty good idea of exactly how they were feeling as they got on board. To be clear, there’s no suggestion that Virgin Atlantic is working with Emotient to achieve this, but there’s no reason it couldn’t.

Silent intent

On the other, arguably more important, side of the equation, Emotient is looking at which key industries it could best be applied to initially, although it’s clear that there are many more potential uses for future diversification.