Dell’s Emotion Reading Computer

Not so long ago, we saw Schwarzenegger’s battle against Skynet in a desperate attempt to save John Connor, resulting in perpetual movie plot paradoxes, as well as unnecessary sequels, but that’s beside the point. What’s important here is the fact that Dell Research via Jai Menon recently announced about their development of software that’s supposed to be synced with a pair of ‘brain-scanning’ headsets, in turn capturing the emotional state of the subject who is brave enough to wear them.

How’s this helping human evolution?

According to Mr Menon, the technology is as close as 5 years away from current times (2017), and the same is to be used to reduce a wearer’s distractions, redirecting phone calls to voice mails when the user finds himself busy enough to not answer his own messages. Apparently, gamers will get improvements too, for if a gamer is hacking and slashing his way throughout a certain game, the software recognizes his progressive boredom and ups the difficulty to match his skills. Imagine a multiplayer game…

And Dell is not the only company interested in emotion recognizers: Microsoft announced similar projects like Moodscope and a “smart bra” monitor device. IBM tested equipment for brain-wave monitoring and Valve Inc. tried something along the line of controllers packed with sensors, but it didn’t quite worked and it all went down the drain from there.

Menon argues that everything is in experimental stages by far, and if it proves successful, we may see a physical incarnation of the ‘emotional-robots’ idea. Or terminators – either one works for us.