Coming across as a socially functioning human who expresses real emotions can be such a drain. If only there was a high-tech way to replace your flat, expressionless gaze with a digital approximation of human warmth. Well, search no more. AgencyGlass is here.
Passengers in a car can help calm an angry driver when another vehicle cuts them off. But when a driver is alone, that anger can easily turn into road rage which puts everyone at risk. So researchers at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne—or EPFL for short—are working on an in-car facial recognition system that knows when the driver isn’t happy.
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Watch Jackson, an awesome four-year-old kid, become overwhelmed by a beautifully sad song while riding in his Dad’s car. He tries to fight off the tears but he can’t help it. He starts crying because the music is so touching but he doesn’t want to change the song. He can’t. He takes off his glasses to feel the hurt even more. Even if it’s so sad, he loves it. It’s an adorable struggle to see him embrace the emotions of music. We have all felt like this kid before. We still do.
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Nerves make your stomach churn; embarrassment brings a glow to your cheeks. Emotions clearly have a direct physiological effect on our bodies, and now a team of Finnish researchers has analyzed exactly how—and represented them in this visualization.
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Promising to revolutionize the amusement park funhouse as we know it, researchers at the University of Tokyo’s Hirose-Tanikawa lab have created a remarkable mirror that does more than just make someone look overly thin or tall. It’s actually able to change the emotion on someone’s face, replacing a frown with a smile, or anger with glee.
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Want to get your message heard on a social network? Try raging about it. China’s Beihang University has published a study of Sina Weibo users which suggests that anger-fueled online posts have more of an influence than those reflecting other emotions. During the research period, a typical bitter comment would affect posts three degrees removed from the original; joy had a muted impact, while disgust and sadness hardly got any traction. Don’t be too quick to lament the human condition, though. As researchers note, many of the angry posts were triggered by politics in Weibo’s native China. There’s a chance that internet denizens on other social networks have a rosier outlook on life.
[Image credit: Wayne Marshall, Flickr]
Source: Cornell University Library
We know that Intel sees 3D cameras as the future of computing, and the company’s Anil Nanduri just provided a few hints of what that future may involve. He tells Network World that the depth-sensing technology can recognize emotions, such as happy smiles. It can also track your gaze; a camera can detect when readers are stumped by unfamiliar words in a book, for example. The technology’s shape detection is accurate enough that it can even scan objects for 3D printing. We won’t get a true sample of the technology’s potential until Creative ships its Senz3D camera before the end of the current quarter. Nonetheless, it’s already evident that Microsoft’s next-generation Kinect for Windows will have some real competition on its hands.
Filed under: Intel
Via: GigaOM
Source: Network World
Humans want to have friends. This need for companionship in a soul-crushingly indifferent world can lead us to confuse mechanical motion with human emotion, as shown in this video by researchers at the University of Calgary.
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See that? That’s a new feature on Facebook’s status box, which has started to roll out this morning after earlier testing in January. It’s also covering up a pretty depressing note from a friend underneath, who would’ve undoubtedly selected “sad” if he were to have recognized said feature before posting a conventional status update. For now, it appears that the emotion selection tool is only hitting select US-based users, as our European contingent has yet to see it appear on their profiles. Essentially, a smiley face has been added to the right of the photo button, and pressing it gives you a quick way to update your status — you can share an emotion, or what you’re watching / listening to / reading / drinking / eating.
It seems as if Facebook wants to funnel conversations a bit; instead of only giving you free rein to blabber in a status box, it’d much rather you update with a linked artist, television show or product. That way, said entity gets included in any conversations you have, and the great revenue wheel begins to spin. At any rate, feel free to check your own page and play around with the new functionality. Then shoot us an emoticon in comments to let us know how you’re feeling about it.
Gallery: Facebook emoticon update
Filed under: Internet, Facebook
Via: TechCrunch
Source: Facebook
Hoping to be holding the personal assistant of the future, researchers at the University of Cambridge have unveiled what’s supposedly the most realistically esxpressive controllable avatar ever. Move aside, Siri—this is what you get for mouthing off. More »
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