Google Glass app being designed to read emotions

Last week, I stood in the cramped office of a Sand Hill Road venture capital firm, staring through Google Glass eyewear at an 18-year-old with a blank expression.

In the display above my right eye, the word "neutral" appeared. Then he cracked a wide smile and the word changed to "happy."

The young man with plenty of reasons to grin is Catalin Voss, an entrepreneur and Stanford student from Germany who has been working on iPhone apps since he was 12 - that is to say, pretty much since there has been an iPhone.

Now, with a small team of mostly fellow students, he's working on emotion-recognition tools that could improve education and training by monitoring engagement. But there are other interesting use cases as well: Voss, who has a cousin with autism, thinks the Glass app could help those with difficulty discerning emotions to interact in more natural ways, easing their path through the world.

The company, Sension, based in the Menlo Park offices of Highland Capital for the summer, is among a handful of businesses making strides in emotion-recognition technology. The tools can analyze facial expressions and vocal patterns for signs of specific emotions: Happiness, sadness, anger, frustration and more.

There's a broad array of potential applications, including potentially creepy commercial ones: If my TV knows I'm feeling depressed, might it load up an ad for fast food? Read more >>