Being able to use facial recognition or augment reality are things that Google Glass is not necessarily capable of in its first iteration but one app may allow people to determine how others are feeling.
Emotient has released an app that can be installed on Google Glass to tell its user how people around them are feeling.
The app, called Sentiment Analysis, is meant to help people figure out how to respond in certain situations based upon the way that others are currently feeling.
One of the odd aspects of an application like this is that having to rely on a piece of technology to know how others are feeling is not usually necessary. Instead, humans with a general understanding of facial expressions (which Emotient’s app uses) can figure out how someone is most likely feeling. Problems with this human capability generally arise when a person is faking a smile or faking their attitude towards a situation and Sentiment Analysis doesn’t appear to interpret those situations accurately either.
Instead of encouraging people to train employees about how to more effectively satisfy customers, Emotient is touting Sentiment Analysis as a “breakthrough” piece of technology that will be very useful in retail environments.
It’s a breakthrough technology that allows companies to aggregate customer sentiment by processing facial expressions anonymously. We believe there is broad applicability for this service to improve the customer experience, particularly in retail. – Ken Denman, CEO, Emotient
At the same time, one of the primary issues with Google Glass explorers thus far is that they are notoriously bad at acting correctly around others. So if this app can fix that, everyone else will probably be quite happy.
Emotient’s press release states that Sentiment Analysis uses facial expressions (just as a human normally would) but in theory it could be more accurate as a piece of technology can pick up on very insignificant facial changes.
Let’s hope that this sort of technology doesn’t start examining heart rate, perspiration, and respiratory rate in order to figure out a person’s emotion, because that would just be creepy.
Summary: Emotient has announced a new Google Glass app called Sentiment Analysis that can examine facial expressions and determine a person’s current mood.
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