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Happy videos are now yours

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BY DON BROWN

SUNCOAST NEWS COLUMNIST

Published: November 14, 2009

How many times has this happened? You go to take a video of someone and when you watch it later you discover the person was not smiling.

Doesn't that just bug you to no end? Have you ever thought to yourself: "If only there was something - some technology - that would guarantee a smiling subject on my finished video. I mean, if we can land a man on the moon, certainly we can have something, anything, that would prevent us from taking pictures of people who look sad or indifferent."

If that was you, Sony was listening. According to my Best Buy Sunday color advertising supplement, the Japanese consumer electronics giant has a camcorder that has a smile detector. It must be a further advancement of last year's breakthrough, the "face detector." This takes virtually all the guesswork out of determining if you are taking a video of a smiling face. When you tell a subject to smile and they don't, but they say they were, you can say "look, the smile detector doesn't lie."

Just look at the progression of idiot-proofing features of video photography, beginning with auto-focus. Next there was anti-shake, and now comes face and smile detection.

I wonder if the smile detector can be tuned to detect a subtle smile. Would it know a grin from a full-tooth smile? I'm sure there is some calibration that needs to be done. There's probably a card with a happy face on it and you have to aim the camera at it until you hear two beeps.

A really high-end smile detector may be able to distinguish between a snarl, a sneer, a grimace or the even more disturbing rictus. You might be able to eliminate from your videos the 'wry' or 'crazed' smile with a flick of a preset. Now, if a camera can detect a smile it can probably be programmed to detect other facial expressions. The 'knowing look,' pensiveness, sheer determination, that 'I'm tired of being videoed all the time' look.

I can remember the old days when most people would take unsteady videos of out-of-focus, faceless, sad people and just accept it. This was reality, the world is often unsteady and out-of-focus and the faceless people weren't happy all the time. That may be all right for reality but evidently it makes for crappy videos. I can only imagine the next advancement to help people make better videos. It seems if you follow the line of improvements the next one up is the 'photogenic' detector.

The camera simply won't operate unless the subject is photogenic, except if it's on manual. A slimming mode would be one that I think people might go for. What with the problem with many people feeling they are overweight.

A little off the subject but when was the last time you knew somebody with the first name of "Smiley"? I'm thinking we would have to go to back to the 1920s.

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