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| 08.13.13 |
As you slip on the Google Glass frames —
placing them carefully over your own eyeglasses — you’re told they can read the
emotions of the people around you.
You peer through the frames, focusing on the
tiny digital display hovering in the air, and just beyond the display, there’s
a face looking back at you, smiling about as wide as it can smile. But the
payoff doesn’t come. Though the face is less than a foot away, Glass doesn’t
read the happiness. “Neutral,” the display says.
As it turns out, the problem isn’t the
computerized eyewear. It’s you. You’re so focused on the hovering display,
you’re not looking at the smiling face. When you turn slightly, gazing straight
at that smile, the display responds. “Happy,” it says. And when the face
changes, dropping the smile for a wide-eyed, wide-mouthed look of shock, the
display changes too. “Surprise,” it says.
These Google Glass frames run an experimental
application cooked up by the person you’re looking at — the guy who keeps
moving from happiness to surprise and back again. His name is Catalin Voss, and
he’s all of 18 years old.
At 15, after catching
the eye of computer science legend Steve Capps, Voss was commuting between
Heidelberg, Germany and California to build mobile applications for a Silicon
Valley startup calledPayNearMe.
Now, two months removed from his freshman year at Stanford University in Palo
Alto, he’s fashioning a Silicon Valley startup of his own, a company that seeks
to remake education using software that tracks facial expressions and body
language.
Known as Sension, the company envisions a world where
online teaching tools instantly respond to your behavior — where, for example,
you’re hit with a quiz question when your attention drifts from a lecture video
— but this fledgling venture also harbors much loftier goals. With help from
Google Glass, Voss and his co-founder, Jonathan Yan, hope to create a
face-tracking engine that can help people to better recognize and understand
the expressions and emotions of others. The tool would be a natural
for treating autism and related disorders, another Google Glass project
that provides more than just
frivolous digital toys.
To turn that lofty
goal into reality, Voss and Yan have assembled a team of Stanford graduate
students to help them build the Sension engine. They’ve already received a
grant from venture capital outfitHighland Capital
Partners. And many psychiatrists, including some who have advised
the company, believe this is a goal worth pursuing.
“Anything that can be used to facilitate
social understanding in people with autism is potentially beneficial,” says
Derek Ott, a professor in the Psychiatry Division at UCLA’s David Geffen School
of Medicine who regularly works with autistic patients and has no connection to
Sension. “A lot of today’s social-skills training is done in an artificial
setting. If you can do it in the moment, in the real world, it could be very
beneficial.”
Catalin Voss says his life changed when Apple
unveiled the iPhone in 2007. Just 11 at the time, he was soon building and
selling countless iPhone apps in his native Germany, and by 2011, he’d tracked
down Capps — one of the founding fathers of two other seminal Apple machines:
the Macintosh and the Newton — and nabbed that mobile coding job with
PayNearMe, Capps’ current startup.
Capps eventually wrote the teenager a Stanford
recommendation letter, and like so many students at Stanford — the school that
gave birth to Google — Voss settled on a startup idea before his freshman year
was out. As freshmen, he and Sension co-founder Yan took an engineering class
that required students to watch a series of interminably boring videos, and
they couldn’t see the logic in it. “We realized there had to be a better way of
doing online learning,” Voss says. “We wanted to create a more interactive
education experience using the webcam.”
The arrival of Google
Glass took this vision in a new direction, and the company soon won a spot in
this year’sSummer@Highland program
— a mini startup incubator just for university students run by the VC firm
Highland Capital Partners. With their $18,000 grant, they started hiring new
coders, including a few Stanford graduate students who could just as easily
taught them classes in the coming semester. One prospective hire, a graduate
student who specialized in computer vision, asked Steve Capps if he should
really take a job with an 18-year-old freshman, and Capps reassured him.
“You know how, in the NBA, they say, ‘He’s six
feet but he plays like he’s six-five?’ I told him, ‘He’s 18, but he plays like
he’s 25.’”
Capps can’t vouch for
the face-tracking software Voss has built — “it gives a good demo,” is the most
he’ll say — and he points out that many companies are now working to perfect this sort of
computer vision. But according to Voss, Sension has already landed a
paying customer, an unnamed educational software company due to unveil a
desktop service based on the Sension engine later today.1
“I’ve been working for 30 years in this
industry and rarely have I seen a college graduate with his combination of
creativity and ability and sociability — meaning he can talk,” Capps says of
Voss. “Ever heard that old joke?: ‘What’s the difference between an introverted
nerd and an extroverted nerd? The extroverted nerd looks at your shoes instead
of his.’ He’s good at that.”
In other words, he’s a coder with more people
skills than the stereotype suggests. When you first meet him, you realize he’s
young, but you don’t realize how young. And even, in mid-conversation, when he
does look at your shoes — or gazes at the wall, above your head — it’s more
endearing than awkward. And it somehow seems appropriate for someone trying to
teach people to better understand how to interact with others. With a cousin
who’s autistic, he has one foot in that world.
The trouble, as Derek
Ott explains, is that teaching people to recognize social cues is only half the
battle. You must still teach them how to respond to those cues. And then
there’s the more obvious problem. Sension may help you relate to other people,
but when you’re wearing Google Glass, theymay have trouble
relating to you.
1Mindflash, of Palo Alto, is the online
education company that’s using the Sension platform. The company announced its
new tool on Tuesday.
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