... ads for vacation packages and consumer electronics, but not weight-loss programs or self-help products.
Do you appear sad? You won’t see that over-the-top animated ad for children’s birthday parties at the local bowling alley. Feeling frustrated? It’s PC support ads for you.
These are actual examples from the patent application, which incorporates some of the same ideas as the earlier filing for deducing the user’s mood — including scanning messages and social media postings.
Also included in the latest patent are audio and video capture devices (to detect facial expressions and tone of voice) in addition to the company’s Kinect sensor, which would be used to analyze body movements as another input for the emotion-detecting algorithm.
As shown in the patent diagram [below], advertisers would be able to tag their campaigns to target users in specific emotional states and avoid others.
The application was originally filed in December 2010 and made public this past week, on 7 June. There’s no indication that the company actually plans to roll this out, but it provides a glimpse into the mindset of Microsoft’s engineers as they contemplate future products.
[Makes cookies look tame, doesn't it? Aldous Huxley was an optimist!]