Will your mobile interpret your mood?

If EmotionSense  has their way then yes, it will. I know what you’re thinking (because I can sense it)…you don’t want your phone to determine your mood right? If it did, sometimes it’d want to leap out of your pocket and down the nearest drain. But there are upsides too…plenty of them.

Imagine if your phone knew you were feeling melancholy and tuned your music tastes appropriately. Or your phone knew you were angry and temporarily hid any emails that may inadvertently get the brunt of that anger (we’ve all been there).

The system is based on sensor monitors and the proliferation of sensors is a trend that will enable more natural user interfaces (unsurprisingly that mouthful has been shortened to NUI). You’ll begin to see some of this in Kinect later this year, with games that recognise you and can react to gestures and speech. There isn’t any emotion sensing capability in Kinect today but a camera that can see your facial expressions and mirror them on screen is to some degree reflecting your emotion when you smile or laugh.

Back to sensors though – doesn’t it seem odd that our mobile phones have cameras yet we can’t unlock them with facial recognition. Or even voice recognition…a more obvious choice for a device designed for voice communication. The technology is there, we just need to change our perspective on how we can use it to remove barriers rather than add them. A friend helped me broaden my perspective on sensors recently – we often think of them as intrusive or invasions of privacy. Here’s a really simple example – if you have an alarm in your home, you likely have motion sensors in each room already. These things have been around for as long as I can remember and they sit their all day doing nothing more than monitoring movement in a room. Wouldn’t it be cool if when you walk in to a room, that same monitor knew to switch on the lights, or turn on the TV depending on how you’d programmed them?

via Jemima Kiss