Smart Home

by Zoe Pollock

Nathan Yau reviews the eerie experiment that is Happylife, a smart-home machine that can monitor a family's moods by reading facial expressions with a thermal image camera. Eventually the system would be able to predict different emotional states, having accumulated data over various years. From a series of vignettes by a family with Happylife in their home:

We installed Happylife. Not much happened at first: an occasional rotation, a barely appreciable change in the intensity...