Emotion-sensing technology: Watch out for Mr. Clippy

New Scientist takes a look at technologies that can sense human emotion, including a vest made by Boston-based Innerscope Research and the “Interactive Social-Emotional Toolkit,” developed by researchers at the MIT Media Lab’s Affective Computing Lab.  

The article quotes a researcher who postulates a “nightmare scenario” that sounds like it would be more mildly irritating than nightmarish: 

But what if some emotion-triggered reincarnated “Mr Clippy” started popping up everywhere?

“The nightmare scenario is that the Microsoft paperclip starts to be associated with anything from the force with which you’re typing to some sort of physiological measurement,” says Gaver. “Then it pops up on your screen and says: ‘Oh I’m sorry you’re unhappy, would you like me to help you with that?’”

MHT talked to Innerscope in January about their vest, worn by Super Bowl viewers’ to track the bodily reactions induced by commercials for Doritos/Pepsi/Budweiser/whatever.

Posted by Brendan Lynch

Tags: Affective Computing Lab, Innerscope Research, MIT, MIT Media Lab

This entry was posted on Monday, July 6th, 2009 at 4:45 pm and is filed under Education & Training, Entrepreneurship, Hardware, Internet, Massachusetts, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.