From Venture Capital Dispatch:
- If you’re happy then we’ll know it. Realeyes crunches data on people’s facial movements to analyze reactions.
A London company that says it can track people’s emotions by watching them through their webcams or smartphones has received a €3.6 million ($3.9 million) boost from the European Commission.
The company, Realeyes, is sharing the grant with researchers at Imperial College London, University of Passau in Germany and British gaming company PlayGen, in an attempt to dive deeper into measuring people’s emotions and figure out whether they like what they are seeing.
“This is absolutely a new frontier,” CEO Mihkel Jäätma said. “It’s really taking emotional measurement to another level.”
Realeyes is one of a number of startups around the globe that crunches data on people’s facial movements to analyze reactions. Supporters say the technology could be used to increase driver safety, improve classroom learning or as a type of lie-detector test by police, though the work raises privacy concerns.
Realeyes, founded in 2007, has built up a database of more than five million frames of people’s faces. The bulk of the company’s 40 employees in Budapest and the U.K. are software engineers and scientists with specializations in image processing, artificial intelligence and other computational sciences. The files have up to seven annotations per frame that can say, for example, whether an eyebrow movement indicates surprise or confusion..
“If you’re smiling, we can detect that,” said Jäätma, who grew up in Estonia. “If you’re frowning, that indicates confusion. If you raise your eyebrows, that’s surprise. But of course there are other signals from other parts of the face which give more solid readings.”...MORE
