Disney’s Next Movie Could Be Watching You, Too
Disney’s Next Movie Could Be Watching You, Too
The company’s research arm is experimenting with facial
recognition to gauge how audiences react.
BY MARK WILSON 07.24.17 8:30 AM
There’s this term in the processed food industry for when
something is quantifiably at its most delicious, but also–critically–still
unsatisfying enough that you always crave more. It’s called the bliss point,
and it’s what ensures that you always want another sip of that soft drink, or
the crunch of that potato chip. It’s about maximizing the bliss of consumption
so that you consume more.
Now, Disney Research has developed a neural network that
seems to be chasing a similar idea–but for the world of movies. The system has
been trained to watch an audience of theatergoers as they watch a film. It can
track reactions like smiling and laughter on hundreds of faces in a dark
theater, allowing Disney to quantify whether or not a film is working as
intended on a granular scale. It’s easy to imagine such technology eventually
reaching well beyond the movie theater, into the real world, where Disney parks
could react to your mood with real-time Disney magic.
Disney’s researchers tested the system across 150
showings of several Disney films like The Jungle Book and Star Wars: The Force
Awakens in movie theaters. Studios like Disney have used the reactions of test
audiences to gauge early cuts of films for decades, often making changes to the
edit or ending if the film wasn’t hitting as hoped. What’s different in this
instance is the sheer amount of analysis Disney Research was able to produce
with this methodology: 3,179 people generated 16 million points of data.
As Disney Research scientist Peter Carr put it to
Phys.org: “It’s more data than a human is going to look through. That’s where
computers come in–to summarize the data without losing important details.”
Impressively, the neural net isn’t just capable of summarizing takeaways.
Within just a few minutes of watching a filmgoer, it could predict their facial
expressions throughout the rest of the film.
Disney is far from the only company working on big data
in media. Snap, most notably, actually measures the shot-by-shot performance of
its Snapchat Shows. That means the company can see if a certain 10-second blip
is losing its audience’s attention. Such insights are actually shaping the way
Snap produces content.
As AI allows media companies to take advantage of these
insights in real time, one can imagine Disney not just changing the way a film
is cut during the test market phase, but actually recutting content in real
time for a viewer’s maximum pleasure. In past decades, the industry was
dominated by an arms race of CGI–a competition between who could present
audiences with the most stunning special effects. Now, we could be moving
toward an age when AI is the crucial differentiator of media, an age where
cameras lurk in movie theaters–or even our smartphones–and every entertainment
company’s best weapon is its ability to reshape content, dynamically, to our
liking.
Microsoft Research has used computer vision systems to
measure facial and body language for a long time now. In one instance, its
researchers actually programmed an elevator to know whether it should open or
close for a person walking past. How? The system measured each person’s facial
expression and body language. Disney Research claims its system can scale
beyond people in a movie theater, and can even capture the intricacies of
real-world movements, like trees blowing in the wind, with applications in
animation. At the very least, one can imagine Disney bringing this technology
into its parks, like the upcoming Star Wars world–customizing the space and the
characters you interacted with to your liking. It’s easy to imagine
sentiment-analysis cameras making their way into other consumer experiences,
too, like vending machines or fast food restaurants.
As you take a bite of those new buffalo chicken fries, an
AI could be watching, tallying your reaction with everyone else, ages 18-35. If
you don’t mind how creepy it all is, camera-based AI might help the whole world
find its bliss point, keeping us perpetually craving the next bite of life.
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