It's a smile detector, or SmileTracker. Its prototype was designed in 2015 by three researchers from the MIT Media Lab, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Through a facial recognition system, this application detects a person's smiles on his computer, photography and simultaneously screenshots. The image is dated and preserved.
The user can, if they wish, combine these photos in a "smile gallery" and share them with his family on the SmileTracker website or on his Facebook page. "We hypothesize," the researchers say, "that reviewing the content that triggered smiles will encourage positive emotions and, hence, general well-being. "
After opening the site, the three researchers of the Media Lab studied the reactions of 34 people using it freely, of which 22 agreed to answer questionnaires. In eighteen days, 1,099 smiles were collected. Some participants used SmileTracker for more than eighty days, which shows, "the researchers concluded," an encouraging level of interest for the application ".
However, responses to the questionnaires revealed that some users were "not very enthusiastic" about the idea of being filmed and "hunted" permanently or sharing these intimate photos. On the other hand, many participants were happy to discover their photos, to be able to collect them and show them. Study Findings: SmileTracker is fairly well accepted, but further research is needed.
This "smile detector" is only one of the dozens that researchers do in "emotional computing" at MIT, a new transdisciplinary field dedicated to designing interactive machines capable of recognizing, measuring and