Sony demos game controller to track motion and emotion

November 6, 2009 | Source: New Scientist Tech

Sony has unveiled a hands-free, full-body game controller, the Interactive Communication Unit (ICU).

Like Microsoft’s Natal, Sony’s ICU tracks a person’s whole body without their having to wear the body markers used in motion-capture studios, and it can detect a player’s emotions by watching their facial expressions, and judge sex and approximate age from their appearance.

CU “reads” facial expressions using a pattern-matching algorithm that has been trained on pictures of people expressing different emotions. Using cues such as the position and shape of the lips, ICU spots five basic states: happiness, anger, surprise, sadness and neutral.

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See also: Sony patents reveal emotion recognition software