Your face is being tracked

Facial detection software can do more than just interpret your age and gender. It can also sense your emotions.

That's what Affective Interfaces' technology does. In real-time, the startup's software tracks users' facial expressions to understand how they're feeling from moment to moment.

Though the product is currently in a closed, test stage, CEO Jai Haissman said that the company has worked with beer maker Anheuser-Busch InBev to determine test subjects' reactions to commercials in real-time.

Haissman believes the technology's possibilities go beyond advertising.

For example, he envisioned a scenario in which a user is playing a video game is growing bored. Affective Industries' software would sense that and tell the game to grow more challenging. He also said one day iTunes playlists could be programmed to match your different moods throughout the day using face detection.

More broadly, Haissman thinks one day there could be a public health purpose, where scientists could detect pockets or regional hotspots of sentiment and try to determine their causes.

"We're the emotion layer of Internet," he said at the FTC conference. "It not only provides useful feedback to the enterprise about how users are responding to a product or content, but for users, it provides information about how they're feeling today or over time."

Haissman said privacy has been baked into the technology, requiring users' "informed consent." A user has to authorize turning the product on for it to activate, and a display tells the user when it's turned on.

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