Anti-piracy tool Will Harvest and Market Your Emotions
Aralia Systems, who specializes in piracy tracking devices - including CCTV cameras and anti-camcorder systems that shine infrared light beams into a movie-watching audience - has teamed up with Machine Vision Lab in what seems like a massive invasion of your privacy beyond “in the name of security.” Machine Vision Lab’s Dr Abdul Farooq told PhysOrg:
“We plan to build on the capabilities of current technology used in cinemas to detect criminals making pirate copies of films with video cameras. We want to devise instruments that will be capable of collecting data that can be used by cinemas to monitor audience reactions to films and adverts and also to gather data about attention and audience movement. We will use 2D cameras to detect emotion but will also collect movement data through a 3D data measurement that will capture the audience as a whole as a texture.
Within the cinema industry this tool will feed powerful marketing data that will inform film directors, cinema advertisers and cinemas with useful data about what audiences enjoy and what adverts capture the most attention. By measuring emotion and movement film companies and cinema advertising agencies can learn so much from their audiences that will help to inform creativity and strategy. It is envisaged that once the technology has been fine tuned it could be used by market researchers in all kinds of settings, including monitoring reactions to shop window displays.”
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