Disney's facial recognition AI watches you watch movies

Disney is experimenting with a deep learning AI that tracks movie goers' emotional reactions to films. The company's research branch developed neural networks that can assess viewers' reactions simply by monitoring their facial expressions as they watch movies like'Big Hero 6,' 'The Jungle Book' and'Star Wars: The Force Awakens.' While tests of the new method - called factorized variational autoencoders or FVAEs - are preliminary, it has already been demonstrated that that the new technique outperformed conventional methods. The data set ended up with 16 million facial landmarks from 3,179 viewers. Though preliminary, the experiment demonstrated a'very strong predictive performance' that could reliably guess a viewer's reactions to the remainder of a movie after just a few minutes Neural networks are computational models that learn similarly to humans, except with a lot more processing power.