E-motional Computers

The state of human and computer interaction is poor, to say the least. Just try yelling at your PC the next time Windows crashes and see how far you get. But IBM researchers are attempting to warm up human-computer relationships by getting computers to recognise human gestures, such as an arm wave to move corresponding object onscreen.
Recently, the company’s researchers went step further by training computer to recognise human emotions. To demonstrate its progress, IBM rolled out Pong, disembodied robotic head that can react to human facial expressions with smile or frown. Pong uses camera to capture your winces and scowls and software to interpret what it sees. But don’t expect your computer to start grinning at you any time soon, apparently it’ll take few years yet for these experiments to produce anything out of the lab.