Page 112 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2014

AC/E digital culture ANNUAL REPORT 2014engineering who is working on the creation of a robot with the feelings, emotions and relationships of a child of about ten. As well as the ideal robot he is working on, the researcher also has a robot assistant. It is spontaneous and energetic, to the point at which the protagonist asks it to what level it has been programmed and the robot assistant says “8”. “Reduce it to 6”, responds the researcher. “We are not used to such emotive levels”. Possibility does not automatically bring acceptance. We are all accustomed, when working with technology, to the need for a period of adaptation, of becoming familiar with it. How much more time would we need to get used to interacting with robots that reproduce our emotions as though they were theirs?The next step from the example we have seen at the University of Cambridge comes from the same university and is intended to demonstrate precisely how the emotions can be used to improve interaction between humans and computers. In this case, furthermore, taking from the interface and the computer screen—”robotising”, as it were—the researcher himself in the form of an android bust. A bust that reproduces voice, movements, facial expressions with the aid of 24 motors in the artificial face to attain the highest possible degree of expressiveness—still very much at a beta stage, it must be said. In Japan there are models incredibly more similar to humans, although I do not know how much research as gone into emotions for them; it must not be forgotten that they have been developed in Japan, where there is a tendency to hide or control emotions in public, focussing them instead on attention to tones of voice when speaking.2. THE ALGORITHM REVOLUTION: FROM LABORATORY TO POCKETAlthough it might not seem so, this whole gamut of scientific and technological research is beginning to be useful beyond the sphere of cybernetics and artificial intelligence. At a level of commercial use orAC/Eprivate analysis, the expressiveness of the face can now be measured using technologies that scan such expressions using cameras that may already be built into almost any device. One of the many companies that are developing this sort of technology is Affectiva's Affdex, based on work by MIT Media. It has a great variety of applications, ranging from advertising and marketing campaigns to measure the customer’s degree of satisfaction, surprise, interest, etc., to election campaigns. Using this technology in the stages prior to the premiere of a film, for example, could provide interesting data on how it will go down with the public. Just a camera is needed to gather data on the sensations and effects caused by an event, listen to an on‐line concert, a press showing, a work of art, etc.Although it is not a face recognition technology, the application Dumbstruck makes use of facial expression, reactions, and in some sense emotions to perform its function. It is a messaging application by means of which, when a user sends an image message, the reaction of the sender is automatically recorded in a little video by the smartphone’s camera. Once the recording is made, the sender receives an alert so that he can see his friend’s reaction to the picture he has just sent. Like many other apps and tools that were devised for use by ordinary people (not to mention Twitter or Facebook, as well as Instagram, Vine, Pinterest and many others), it might soon be used by cultural entities of all types to interact with their followers, readers, visitors, spectators, etc. That is to say, there is just one step from games amongst friends to viral marketing, interactive and personalised. Reactions to promotional campaigns, the cover of a book or disk, a poster, a photo of the author, an actor, etc. Later we shall look in greater detail at how the emotional factor is taking root precisely in the field of online communication.Another technology related to the monitoring of facial expression, which we have already mentioned in connection with robotics research, is voice recognition. As in the case of cameras, all that is needed is a microphone and the integration of the necessary technology, whether as stand‐aloneWHERE WE ARE HEADING: DIGITAL TRENDS IN THE WORLD OF CULTURETHEME 9: THE NEW AFFECTIVE TECHNOLOGIES COME TO THE CULTURAL SECTOR CURRENT PAGE...112