Smile Police
Last year, 500 or so employees of the Keihin Electric Express Railway in Tokyo lined up in front of a camera to be judged by the Japanese company Omron’s Smile Scan software, which measures facial movement and rates smiles from 1 to 100. And smile enforcement is just the beginning; a whole slate of behavior-recognition software will someday pick people out of a crowd for insufficient perkiness.
WHY, GOD, WHY? It’s not Orwell—it’s Omron’s OKAO Vision facial-recognition software suite, developed to help machines understand facial expressions and now used to monitor fatigue in truck drivers. Smile Scan does its creepy evaluative thing in more than 100 Japanese businesses and organizations.
FEAR FACTOR Behavior-recognition software has already infiltrated our lives. A system called NICE helps call centers determine when a phone customer is becoming angry, and surveillance systems like Perceptrak can detect suspicious behavior via camera. Researchers across the globe are refining what the technology can do. The next iterations, such as software by the British company OmniPerception, will identify—and perhaps someday decode—an individual’s gait or smile. Soon even your living room will evaluate you: Last year, Sony applied for a patent on a mood-detecting device for its PlayStation 3.
