Note the Ice Cream
Thursday, July 1, 2010 at 12:53PM Cool (har) technology to solve the age old problem of getting free ice cream. Pretty fantastic — except for that whole collecting demographic information thing.
Share Happy vending machine dispenses ice cream for a smile (and your soul):
The brainchild of Unilever (the company that owns Ben & Jerry’s, Good Humor, Breyers, Klondike, and Wall’s), Share Happy is a $20,000 Sapient-built ice cream vending machine that takes your picture, using facial recognition to determine if you’re smiling and Photo Booth-esque features (superimposing “funny hats, a mustache, glasses, bow tie, afro hair, things like that,” on your mug) to coax you into smiling. And once it determines that you are smiling, it gives you a free ice cream treat — but not before collecting valuable demographic information by analyzing the image for things like gender and approximate age and asking you to sign away your likeness for promotional use.
See the Share Happy in action [flash video].
