By Ryan Singel
September 15, 2009 | 4:50pm
Categories: Crowdsourcing

The morning’s most interesting launch came from facial-expression-identifying company, Affective Interfaces, which charges advertisers, marketers and filmmakers for visual samples of hundreds of internet users who agree to be monitored via webcam.

Epicenter Article

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

Even more interesting will be linking this type of technology to evolutionary algorithms, but that deserves its own post. Needless to say, finding a way to not only monitor but engage with our emotions in an immediate way could create some of the most effective media yet to be experienced, and also the most seductively terrifying.

Link to the blog

Also at the event this morning, two startups showed off technology that turn standard metrics on their head. Affective Interfaces uses its motion-sensing technology and a web camera to analyze people’s facial expressions and measure their emotions. The software-as-a-service solution yields data that can be used for market research to determine how people feel about products, web sites or commercials. During the demo, Affective Interfaces’ technology measured the happiness of Digg’s Kevin Rose, a judge on the panel, on a graph by analyzing a pre-recorded video of Rose smiling and frowning backstage at the conference.

http://is.gd/3qUzq

By Joanna Stern on September 16, 2009 at 7:20 AM

"You don’t know me, webcam! You think you can just see my face and read my emotions!? Yea, that is gonna be the fight I have with my webcam if Affective Interfaces ever releases its emotion sensing software."

Gizmodo Article

Mark Hachman on Tuesday September 15, 2009

Affective Interfaces was probably the coolest startup in the group…

Appscout Article

By Alex Wilhelm on September 15, 2009

…The business model here is sort of brilliant. It basically allows for some massive outsourcing of focus groups. You can form a group of people from anywhere so long as they have the software installed and any webcam. I’d invest.

TechGeist article

Sep 18, 2009
The Magic of Facial Cues
Author: ResearchTalk | Filed under: Emotions, Future of research, Innovation

Affective Interfaces is keen to reach out to potential partners, customers and funders (they’re self-funded). We regard them as an exciting addition to the world of new research and so encourage you to engage with them (as you’ll hear in the podcast they’ve already had a good amount of interest from the event).

VCs and corporate M&A folk: this could become a very special company.”

http://is.gd/3qT9J

AI’s CEO Jai Haissman interviewed by BuzzLogic’s Valerie Combs, VP Corporate Communications. Video after the jump (7min).

September 23, 2009

"We’re certainly at a point in the advertising industry where new models are desperately needed. Clicks are just not really cutting it in terms of a direct response mechanism, so understanding what’s behind like your technology promises to do is really interesting."

Interview

By Anthony Ha on September 15, 2009

"Affective Interfaces demonstrated some cool new technology today that uses emotion sensing software with webcam footage. The company launched today at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco.

Affective’s software detects how people are feeling. But Affective Interfaces isn’t about checking in on how Mom’s doing. The startup is launching its software as a tool for ad companies to test the effectiveness of ads and other content. It sounds like there’s big potential here for even more widespread use.

Chief executive Jai Hassman says that when it comes to advertising or other content, it can be hard to predict how people will react emotionally. Focus groups are a common way to test that, but that’s just a small group of people. Getting quantitative data about the emotions of larger groups is still "in the stone age," Hassman says.

Affective Interfaces can take content from its clients, play it for hundreds or thousands of people (currently, recruited either via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing system or through the company’s market research partners), then deliver numerical data about how those people felt throughout the video. Affective can create webcam montages of many users’ faces at once, giving advertisers and publishers an overall picture of how people are reacting to each part of the content.

Beyond ad research, Affective Interfaces says it could become a social tool, as well as a way to detect drowsiness when people are driving."

VentureBeat article

Presentation Link