14 DAY TRIAL // Everywhere you turn these days people are taking a selfie, be it at the local café, at concerts or just randomly on the street, folks stop to immortalize the daily events that make up their existence.
But have you ever imagined a universe where smartphones or tablets would shoot selfies continuously and tirelessly? No? Well Sony has. Apparently, the Japanese device maker has filed a pretty creepy patent outlining a system allowing your trusty intelligent friend to shoot selfies continuously (as seen at Venture Beat).
The resulting photos will then be sent to a server via a secure pipeline. But what makes this setup even more compelling is the fact that Sony will apparently use an artificial “intelligence” of some sort, capable of reading human expressions and understanding the emotions being displayed. The system will arrange the photographs based on what expressions showing up on the subjects' faces.
So the images where you are looking happy will be separately displayed from the images where you seem ambiguous or maybe bummed out.
Sony's patented selfie camera technology: creepy or useful?
At this point you might be wondering what continuous selfie snapping entails? It means that the camera will always be on the lookout and snap images at all times, even while you are sleeping. This is presumably achieved so the system would figure out the user’s sleeping habits. But don’t we have sleep trackers for that already? Frankly, Sony’s idea just sounds extremely creepy and bizarre.
Here’s a tidbit from the patent where Sony describes what this seemingly ground breaking invention is all about.
“A system and method include determining predicted emotional events associated with an emotional response by a subject, forming a timeline based on the predicted emotional events, and acquiring image data associated with the subjected to be acquired based on the timeline.”
What the patent doesn’t really describe is whether you’ll need to always position the smartphone in such a way as for the selfie camera to be directed at your face? Or will Sony come up with some sort of system that will allow the smartphone to follow you around (embed it into a little robot? We’re wild guessing here).
Anyway, the patent was submitted around Christmas 2013 just as things were starting to heat up in the selfie department. So just because Sony filed a patent doesn’t mean we’re necessarily going to see a smartphone take advantage of such a system.
