Social interactions are central to human life. For most people, moving your face to express your emotions is an automatic and natural thing. But what happens when you cannot move the muscles of your face? In the Dutch TV program “Je zal het maar hebben” (loosely translated as: “what if you have it”) presenter Tim Hofman follows young people with a special condition. In the episode that aired last Tuesday, the program followed Arnoud, who has Moebius syndrome. People born with this syndrome have paralysed facial muscles. This means he always has the same expression. To find out what this expression expressed, Tim and Arnoud went by our office to measure his expression with FaceReader.

What is the perfect cookie? How do you decide this? Many research groups use FaceReader to investigate emotions during eating and drinking behaviour (see an example here). Generally, there are some correlations between different measures of hedonic liking (or disliking) and facial expressions. Benefits of using facial expression analysis to measure responses towards food products are that you can measure emotions automatically, and during the event (instead of having to ask afterwards). There are also some difficulties; most importantly, food causes an occlusion in front of the face. In the Virtual Emotion Reader project, the goal of VicarVision, Noldus IT and NIZO food research was to create a better measurement of emotion whilst eating. The partners in the project performed an online validation experiment where people ate cookies in front of the camera.

Why does the shower curtain always stick to your legs? What is more sustainable, cheese or herring? These kind of questions were asked in the annual national science quiz (de Nationale Wetenschapsquiz 2017), which aired the 26th of December (watch it here). Ionica Smeets and Pieter Hulst presented the quiz and the guests were three duos consisting of a scientist and an artist. In this program, the teams tried to answer surprising and interesting questions on scientific research. You can find all the questions and answers here (in Dutch). Two teams played the finale, where the program used our FaceReader software in a very interesting way.

In many futuristic movies, you see robots performing countless day-to-day tasks. Well… the future is here (almost)! For a project funded by COMMIT, we helped create a robot receptionist, named R3D3 (Rolling Receptionist Robot with Double Dutch Dialogue). The aim of this project was to create a combination of a virtual human and a robot capable of verbal and non-verbal interactions with humans. Together with University of Twente’s HMI and RAM, we succeeded in building a robot platform with the technical capacities to realize such interactions.

The R3D3 prototype can drive around, adjust its height, and carries a tablet with a virtual human face. The robot includes technology for speech recognition and speech production, and has FaceReader based computer vision techniques that can recognize gender, age and emotions. In addition, the virtual avatar on the tablet can interact with people. Here we report the results of three pilot studies, carried out to evaluate the performance of the robot and investigate how people reacted to it. Each pilot tested a different target population; shop visitors, police personnel, and children.

What does lust look like? How do people respond to something they find exciting? FaceReader has endless application possibilities. The Dutch television program “Spuiten en Slikken” used FaceReader to measure responses towards explicit erotic images. Spuiten en Slikken is a spicy television show, on a public service channel, that informs their viewers about everything related to sex and drugs. In this current topic, which aired on Tuesday the 24th (warning: explicit content), they interviewed a girl who was asexual. Someone who is asexual lacks sexual attraction to others. Sexologists consider it a sexual orientation, but there is a lot of prejudice towards it. Therefore, the TV show used different ways to figure out what it means to be asexual. One of these was using FaceReader to measure someone’s objective response towards erotic videos.