Is sentiment a virtual currency?

What can the computer's emotion recognition be used for?

Most people may still stay in the American drama "Lie to Me" stage, think of the emotional identification as a lie detector use, grasp the suspect? Dou San? But as the Affdex developer Kaliouby said in the previous article: "I believe that by mastering people's emotional information, we can help people live a healthier and more active life." ”

First, a more exotic application example. The Spanish government faced a severe budget crisis in 2012 and adopted stringent austerity measures, including a 13% tax on theatre tickets. Teatreneu, a Barcelona comedy club that lost One-third of its night-goers, turned to McCann McCann for help. On the advice of McCann, they installed a similar affdex in each seat, and then opened it free to the public, the tickets were based on the number of smiles, and promised to charge the audience 0.3 euros per smile and a maximum of 80 smiles. Anyone who tries to cover up a smile will be charged a full 24 euros ticket. The result is not only a 35% increase in the source, but also a significant increase in income.

This example is interesting to illustrate the application of emotional recognition in gaining attention. It is not difficult to imagine the arrival of "emotional economy". In fact, each of us has experienced this strange exchange, with "eyes" for all kinds of things. Thomas Mandel and Gerard Van der Leun wrote in their book The Rules of the net: "Attention is a strong currency in cyberspace." "They realised in 1996 that the virtual economy would be driven by a new type of target market." The paid service we use for free is paid for by our attention. The good news, though, is that the focus is rising, with America's Super Bowl ads, for example, in 2010, when someone estimated the value of about six cents per minute, and in 2014, it went up to 20 cents, a full doubling. What does that mean? Attention is becoming a scarce resource, and it is precisely because of this scarcity that it promotes the excavation of consumer cognition.

There are now about 100 of the most emotive-sensing patents, most of which are related to advertising. For example, affidavit has applied for a patent that responds dynamically to the dynamic pricing of an ad, as well as an emotional vending machine, and ATM machines that decide whether to push ads in response to customer sentiment.

Not long ago, Verizon (Verizon) was planning to develop a media console. The console can measure the age, sex, height, weight, skin color, facial features of a house, and can also identify pets, furniture, and even a bag of potato chips. It can also detect other devices in the house, find out whether people in the house are surfing the Internet or watching TV, and then push ads according to the mood of the people. If the people in the house feel the pressure, it may push the ads for some aromatherapy candles and then play them on the equipment inside the house.

In fact, Apple is also heading in the direction of the new iphone, which has a built-in tiyatien, an app that detects health data to test the user's weight, heart rate, sleep and even oxygen saturation. The data can also be used to build a mood-monitoring file. Smartphones with similar functions can also easily monitor people's stress, loneliness, and even the ability to predict your grades. In addition, Apple Watch also has the ability to detect various body indicators such as heart rate. All this bodes well for Apple's new research line: emotional-oriented advertising.

But we can't ignore the privacy issues that come with this, and will people be willing to accept this ad push? Is it a violation of one's privacy to test people's emotional state? But once people are really willing to provide these emotional data, Kaliouby gives a very interesting possibility: positive emotions can be translated into virtual currencies and traded for all sorts of things, and these emotional messages can be offered to companies that need them to win a real "emotional market." ”。