Page 116 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2014

AC/E digital culture ANNUAL REPORT 2014even bestsellers. Samantha and Emily, fiction and reality, have already obtained similar successes, or even greater ones.Let us return to Her and to the user’s field of action. I have described how the protagonist asks his smartphone to put sad music on. It is true that there is an application called Stereomood that is heading in this direction, except that instead of using voice recognition it still requires the participation of the user in order to gather data, and so further refine its results, that is, in its service of discovering and recommending new content. This application offers a varied musical repertoire according to the mood the user says he or she is in. As a way to discover new music and groups it turns out to be a very accurate tool and quite addictive in a way. Furthermore, it performs one of the basic functions of these newothers, are putting all their efforts into developing technologies of this type.At the University of Cambridge again, an application has been developed called EmotionSense6, which tries to determine its user’s mood, degree of satisfaction or happiness, combining certain data also collected during smartphone browsing. Thanks to the collection of such information together with another set of data provided by the user, the app gives a report on its users emotional state. As we have already seen in the case of Stereomood, emotional technology of this sort may have a number of uses in our daily lives, such as constantly improving the accuracy of our searches and purchases, even making the process of discovering them entertaining. An interactive resource with which, for example, we can choose something to read, buy a theatre ticket, or go to a concert or exhibition depending on how these technologies read us in order to offer us different possibilities according to this interpretation.The speed being attained by this technology, together with this tremendous capacity to combine data of all sorts, means that, beyond affective computing, we are entering in parallel with what has been called “contextual computing”, which brings together our interests, behaviour, social relationships, reactions together with all sorts of personal data to give us all the possible and necessary information.3. COMMUNICATIONAND EMOTIONAL DESIGN: THE ATTRACTIONOF THE INSTANTWe have seen a few examples of these technologies that are already available, above all on mobile devices, that are based in cutting‐edge scientific research. However, at a simpler level of communication, there is also this factor that we call emotional with which we want to transmit how ourAlgorithms that analyse language to determine the level of product satisfaction and make user. recommendationstools, namely to find out about new content that might really interest theFrom the examples we have been seeing it is clear that “affective computing” is going to decisively change the way we humans relate with machines. Companies of all sorts are taking more and more notice of these technologies, given that emotion is the driving force behind the way the consumer relates to products and services. In the fields of searching and algorithms that are familiar to us, Web search engines are still evolving along the lines of the Semantic Web, although the ever more frequent use of mobile devices for queries of all sorts has added a possibility of interaction that desk‐top machines cannot attain. Mobile technology is becoming more and more in tune with wearable technologies. That is, technology that can be worn, whether in the clothing or as part of apparatus or accessories that is already being applied in fields such as sport and health, but soon it will spread to other levels and industries, including culture. Google Glass is a well known and very typical example. In fact, Google, Samsung and Apple amongst manyAC/E WHERE WE ARE HEADING: DIGITAL TRENDS IN THE WORLD OF CULTURETHEME 9: THE NEW AFFECTIVE TECHNOLOGIES COME TO THE CULTURAL SECTORCURRENT PAGE...116