According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple has acquired facial recognition startup Emotient, that can Predict Attitudes and Actions.
What Apple would do with such technology is unclear. So far, Emotient appears to have been used for retail and ad marketing purposes, for example to understand a viewer’s reaction to a television commercial. According to Emotient’s website, “The company is at the vanguard of a new wave of emotion analysis that will lead to a quantum leap in customer understanding and emotion-aware computing.”
As seen in the video clip below, taken during the Super Bowl last year by Emotient, the startup can track the facial reactions of many individuals in a large group at once. It analyzes the emotions of each face to determine feelings like “Joy,” “Fear,” “Sadness,” and “Contempt.”
Emotient has been granted 5 patents surrounding facial recognition. One such patent “Automatic analysis of individual preferences for attractiveness” attempts to determine what kind of physical characteristics an online dater is looking for based on the photos of potential dates that the person interacts with.
Emotient was based in San Diego. The company’s CEO was entrepreneur Ken Denman, and lead scientist Marian Stewart Bartlett, a Research Professor at University of California San Diego in the area of machine learning and face processing.
No purchase price has been revealed. Emotient had previously raised a total of $8 million in funding between two rounds since December 2013, for a valuation north of $20 million, according to Pitchbook.
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