Affective gadgets?

Clive Thompson recently published The Emotional Gadget on Wired:

Projects like this are still in the lab. But they might not be for long, because today’s gadgets—particularly smartphones—are crammed with tech that’s ripe for emotion detection: motion sensors that know when you’re running frantically or sitting quietly, GPS that can tell whether you’re at work or in a bar.

I posted some notes on the subject in an earlier post, but apps on highly mobile devices are a nice angle. The article concludes:

Granted, the right way to respond to moods is not always clear. (Hell, this confuses most humans.) But if we can get it right, I predict we’ll soon see a fascinating new crop of devices: MP3 players that adapt a playlist to your mood, phones that hold off on text messages if you’re in a particularly intense face-to-face conversation. Our computers have been robots too long; it’s time they softened up.

If we sit in front of a laptop then the software may use a camera to detect facial expressions an evaluate the user’s mood. This does not seem nearly as practical with a smartphone. Maybe it will have to come down mostly to speech analysis for mood detection?

Letting them understand us better

As you first start reading Can your computer make you happy?, scenes from Space Odyssey 2001 or the more recent (and well done) Moon may readily come to mind. The author appears to foresee that reaction.

In sci-fi films, when anyone gives a computer emotions, it all goes horribly wrong. The computer becomes vain, doubtful and irrational and Armageddon by wayward technology is only narrowly avoided.

This is not surprising – science fiction has been informing us and becoming part of our culture for a while. It is increasingly really all around us: We Are Living in a Sci-Fi World.

Affective computing is an intriguing concept though:

Affective computing is a branch of the study and development of artificial intelligence that deals with the design of systems and devices that can recognize, interpret, and process human emotions. It is an interdisciplinary field spanning computer sciences, psychology, and cognitive science.

Imagine educational software that modifies its teaching style depending on the user’s mood. Cars that communicate with other drivers, if its driver is angry, intoxicated or talking on the phone. Music players could adjust their playlist based on the listener frowning, smiling or similarly expressing themselves. Email clients could disable the send button, if the user is clearly upset and about to send out an email he or she may regret later.

A lot of different uses are conceivable here and this could contribute to much more personalized computing experiences.

Modern laptops and desktop computers are typically already equipped with microphones and cameras. Future operating systems may well feature a mood evaluation component and search engines may take information from that component as part of the search query. Similar scenarios are conceivable for other types of web-enabled applications.

Imagine logging in to Facebook some evening and finding a notification “John has been having a bad day. Check in with him to make sure he’s okay.” Intriguing.

And at least a little bit eerie.