EMOTION-DETECTION CAPABILITY IS COMING SOON TO A WIDE RANGE OF MOBILE APPS, THANKS TO SEVERAL SYSTEMS NOW AVAILABLE.

A variety of projects unveiled in the past year aim to give mobile apps the ability to instantly detect a person’s emotional state.

A startup called Affectiva, which emerged out of MIT’s Media Lab, last month launched a software developer kit (SDK) for its emotion-tracking technology. The company claims that it’s possible to assess the effect that advertising and branding have on a person if you analyze that person’s facial expressions through the camera of a mobile device.Affectiva’s Affdex SDK could enable emotion-tracking to be built into mobile apps. For now, the SDK supports app development on Apple’s iOS.With Affdex, processing takes place on the device, not on a remote server, as is the case with some comparable technologies, according to Affectiva. That raises the possibility of developing systems that sense emotions in real time and feed their results into another app and thereby change what happens with that app. For example, constant emotional feedback could change the trajectory of a game or an interactive story depending on how the user feels about various scenes.Full article