Now You Can Upload a Photo and Calculate Its Emotions

Microsoft recently released an online tool that looks at a given photo and calculates the emotional index of the subject in said photo. Here’s how you can use it right now, either for fun or for practical use.

You’ll need to head to this page to get access to Microsoft’s Project Oxford Emotion API. From there, you can upload your own images (or enter an image URL to pull one from the Internet) and after a few seconds of analysis and calculations, you should see emotion data.

The tool recognizes eight core emotions: anger, contempt, fear, disgust, happiness, neutral, sadness, and surprise. Each emotion is given a numerical value.

If developed further, this technology could be used in many ways that will inevitably impact society in a major way.

For example, we could see ads in cities that detect your mood and change accordingly for maximum impact. Restaurants could capture real-time analyses of how their patrons feel. And the possibilities in interactive media are endless.

Play around and tell us what you think of the Emotion API. Do you think it could change the world? We’d love to hear from you in the comments!