Bentley released its iOS app, Bentley Inspirator as a way to make choosing your very expensive car a little easier. Sometimes people can be paralyzed by choice. But if you're in the market for a Bentley Bentayga, suffer no more: Your minute changes in facial expressions are enough for the company to suggest the perfect car for you. While I'm not sure I'll ever be in the market for a Bentley, the app is free, so I gave it a try.
Researchers from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, and Stanford University have developed a new method for "real-time facial reenactment." This means that you can have one person making faces or mouthing words, and those expressions and movements are simultaneously displayed on live video of the face of someone else.
Animals, like humans, use facial expressions to communicate emotional states. But there was no systematic way for researchers to correlate these facial movements across species or with the appropriate context. Now a team led by researchers from the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom has created a standard to measure horses' facial expressions, which could help caretakers better understand when horses are distressed. The research was published today in PLOS ONE.
The whole point of virtual reality is to offer up the feeling of being transported into another world. But currently, avatar facial expressions fail to live up to VR's promise. Interacting with another human in a VR realm has more closely resembled a conversation with Zoltar, the infamous robotic fortune teller.
When a rodent feels pain, its face gets all scrunched up. Its ears flatten, its eyes narrow, and its nose and cheeks swell. Is this just a reflexive response that helps the animal cope with the pain? Or does it also help the rodent communicate its pain to others, either as a warning signal or a call for help? Findings from a new study suggest that rats can read the pain on other rats' faces, and use that information to make decisions.
For nearly half a century, social scientists have operated under the assumption that all basic human emotions are universally recognizable. Countless cross-cultural experiments—not to mention a few television shows (eg Lie to Me)—have both directly and implicitly referenced the notion that every person on earth expresses facial emotion in the same way. Regardless of cultural context, we can all interpret happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust in the expressions of the people around us... right?
