Written by Lars Rengersen on 2/09/2010
We’re happy to announce that our mobile application Snapje (emotion recognition in relation to context to help children with autism) has been selected out of 160 candidates and is now one of the 20 nominees to go through to the second round.
Vodafone Mobile Clicks is an international, high profile contest for the best mobile internet startup. The best mobile internet startup is selected by a professional jury in three different jury rounds. The jury selected the very best entries based on the 5 criteria mentioned below:
- Originality, creativity and innovativeness
- Technical and operational ability
- Economic and financial viability (business case)
- Use case and end-user value
- The quality of the members of the (management) team (e.g. their experience, knowledge, skills, relationships)
Snapje is an application to practise emotion recognition in relation to the context for children with autism. We’re very happy that we made it to the second round. This gives us a lot of (positive!) energy!
More information can be found here: http://www.vodafonemobileclicks.com/blog/
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Written by Gijs Huisman on 14/04/2010
You are probably familiar with the tele-marketing phenomenon: People calling you to sell you some product, just when you’re about to have dinner. Of course, you are much to nice to verbally express the intense anger you’re feeling. Researchers at the University of Tokyo have developed a tool that may help you to express yourself without yelling.
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Written by Marco van Hout on 17/03/2010
Today, I stumbled upon an interesting article that refers to research done at Emory University. The study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, is part of an effort to learn more about the impact of cartoons and video games on the human brain.
“Humans experience emotional engagement with animated characters, empathizing with happiness, sadness or other emotions displayed by the characters”
To understand why humans relate to artificial characters in this way, they set out to determine if chimpanzees would respond empathetically to virtual characters. The researchers used contagious yawning to test empathetic response. “Yawns are contagious in the same way other emotional responses, like smiles, frowns and fear, are contagious,” said Matthew Campbell, the lead researcher.
The chimps yawned significantly more in response to 3D animations of yawning than they did to animated chimps making control mouth movements.
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Written by Lars Rengersen on 24/02/2010
Recently I received a very interesting gift from friends, YourEmo. It’s a living emoticon. Designed to work on Microsoft plaforms, it analyses the emoticons you use and tries to express those. Youremo can move its eyes, mouth and eyebrows.
Unfortunately it does not work on my Macbook (yet?).
It’s an interesting idea/concept but still quite a gadget and not the level of dealing with emotion as we are doing within SusaGroup. They do invite others to come up with ideas and applications. Maybe combining with some developments at SusaGroup generates some interesting possibilities.
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