14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has recently launched a new Windows 10 application whose purpose is to highlight the capabilities of machine learning systems by asking users to stare at the screen and imitate emojis.
The app is called Emoji8 and it displays a collection of emojis that users need to recreate with their own face. It then scans the face to determine how accurately the user manages to imitate the displayed emojis, giving a rating for each attempt and providing additional features like GIF sharing with Twitter support.
Offered as a UWP app, Emoji8 uses Windows Machine Learning to determine how close your facial expressions get to original emojis.
“Emoji8 is sample UWP application that uses Windows Machine Learning to evaluate your facial expressions while you imitate a random selection of emojis. The app takes in a video feed from your computer’s webcam and evaluates the images with the FER+ Emotion Recognition model version 1.2 locally on your machine,” Microsoft explains.
“Frames are locally assessed as soon as they are snapped from the camera to allow real-time machine learning evaluation and game screen updates.”
Source code available on GitHub
The app is available right now in the Microsoft Store and it is obviously offered free of charge to all users on Windows 10.
You need to be running Windows 10 October 2018 Update (version 1809) to download it, while those who are interested in coding apps that include the machine learning technology need Visual Studio 2017.
Microsoft has also published the source code of the app on GitHub, and the company explains that you can further tweak it with Visual Studio 2017 (version 15.7.4 or newer) on Windows 10 SDK build 17763. Additionally, Microsoft has also provided a link to the FER+ Emotion Recognition source code, also available on GitHub, and you can have a look at it here.