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7.3.2 Blue Bubble Lab and Emovision
Based on an interview with Ben van Dongen, CEO and founder, BlueBubbleLab
Blue Bubble Lab is a media and technology company based in Palo Alto and
Amsterdam that focuses on bringing more relevant messages to consumers based on
their emotions and behavior. ThirdSight (
www.thirdsight.com
), a subsidiary of Blue
Bubble Lab, has developed a suite of technology products that bring together com-
puter vision, facial expression analysis, and eye tracking. One product, Emovision,
is an application that allows the researcher to understand the participants' emo-
tional state while pinpointing what they are looking at. It is a powerful combination
of technologies because the researcher can now draw a direct connection between
visual stimuli and an emotional state at any moment in time. This will be invalu-
able in testing how different visual stimuli produce a range of emotional responses.
Emovision determines the emotional state based on the participants' facial
expressions. In the 1970s, Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen (1975) developed
taxonomy for characterizing every conceivable facial expression. They called
it the Facial Action Coding System, which included 46 specific actions involv-
ing the facial muscles. From his research, Ekman identified six basic emotions:
happiness, surprise, sadness, afraid, disgust, and anger. Each of these emotions
exhibits a distinct set of facial expressions that can be reliably identified auto-
matically through computer vision algorithms. Emovision uses a webcam to
identify the facial expressions at any moment in time and then classifies it into
one of seven unique emotions: neutral, happy, surprise, sad, scared, disgusted,
and puzzled. At the same time, the webcam is used to detect eye movements.
Figure 7.14
shows how the Emovision application works. On the left side
of
Figure 7.14
the participant's facial expressions are analyzed. Distinct facial
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