Last month we were invited to give a demonstration of our facial recognition software at an event of the Amsterdam municipality. This broad and inspiring conference “Smart City Smart Finance – Smart People” focused on innovative practices relating to people and technology. There were several interesting presentations with original perspectives: from what we can learn about management from orchestra conductor Jules van Hessen, to why it is so difficult to change your behavior by bestselling author Ben Tiggelaar. There were also interesting demonstrations, for example, you could immerse yourself in a 4d film experience and interact with a large selection of robots.

We are happy to announce the release of FaceReader 8, perhaps the most ambitious and elaborate release so far. It is now possible to measure expressions of children under the age of 2 (Baby FaceReader), to record audio and make infrared recordings, to measure consumption behavior, to analyze left and right action units separately, and to create your own expressions. For a more elaborative overview, see our partner’s page what’s new. In this blog post, we want to further go into the ‘create your own expression’ module.

Last Sunday, a very interesting Dutch documentary “Game of Phones” was aired on the public broadcasting channel. This documentary dealt with how the smartphone appears to turn life into one big game. Where do we see this gamification and what are the consequences? This topic was illustrated from different angles, for example, you see teenagers explaining the social rules in tagging friends on social media, or an Uber driver giving tips on how to get the best scores.

Our surroundings influence our emotions. Consumatics, a consumer research company specialized in subconscious behaviour, has used our newest product Vicar Analytics for a very interesting experiment. In this blog post, we briefly present the results that they have nicely reported here in Dutch.

At the Innovation Lab on the Horecava 2018, a large event for professionals in the restaurant and hotel business, Consumatics created seven environments with a different ambiance. By changing the smell, music, and lighting they created an area with, for example, a nature, lovesick or masculine ambiance. Vicar Analytics then measured the emotions and the behavior of visitors in each environment. Vicar Analytics can give real-time anonymous customer analytics and measures gender, age, viewing time, and seven basic emotions.

Source: Captions from PBS proadcast of the hearing

One the most popular topics in recent news is Mark Zuckerberg’s, CEO of Facebook Inc., testimonies to congress. The CEO of Facebook was called to answer questions on matters of data privacy, security and misuse triggered by the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal. News outlets all over the world have debated on whether Zuckerberg was asked the right questions or gave satisfactory answers. Others commented on his demeanor. Since ancient times, the face has been described as a “picture of the mind” (Cicero). And one thing is for certain: for most of his five-hour senate hearing Zuckerberg’s face was quite expressionless.

Source: edited from PBS proadcast of the senate hearing