Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Cars
  3. News

Kia wants future autonomous cars to be able to read passengers’ emotions

By
Kia at CES 2019

At CES 2019, Kia will look into the future, to a time when self-driving cars are the norm. When every person is a passenger, companies will need new ways to improve the experience, Kia reasons. The automaker believes artificial-intelligence technology that can recognize human emotions is the way to do that.

Kia is working with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab’s Affective Computing group to develop a system called READ, short for Real-time Emotion Adaptive Driving. Kia calls the system a world first, claiming it can analyze a person’s emotional state through “bio-signal recognition technology” and artificial intelligence. The system can then alter certain aspects of the cabin to lift the occupant’s mood, according to Kia.

Recommended Videos

“We have developed the READ system to create an interactive future mobility in-cabin space by converging cutting-edge vehicle control technology and A.I.-based emotional intelligence,” Albert Biermann, head of research and development at Kia, said in a statement. “Consequently, the READ system will enable continuous communication between drivers and vehicles through the unspoken language of ’emotional feeling,’ thereby providing an optimized human senses-oriented space for drivers in real time.”

Related

Biermann is the former BMW executive Kia hired to make its production cars more exciting to drive. But things like handling won’t matter much if autonomous cars proliferate. Even today, most drivers don’t get to fully exploit the capabilities of their cars. They spend lots of time sitting in traffic instead. That, along with the potential to reduce crashes, is a major impetus for self-driving cars.

Kia won’t demonstrate READ in a real car at CES. Instead, it will use a mockup of a car interior. Kia previously said it would begin testing autonomous cars in “smart cities” in 2021, but so far its efforts have been on a smaller scale than other companies. Parent Hyundai seems to be taking the lead on that.

If cars can reliably drive themselves, people will suddenly have more free time. As they sit in vehicles shuttling them from place to place, they will also be a captive audience. It’s possible that companies will not only use new technology to make the experience more pleasant, but to try to sell things to passengers. If Kia’s emotion-recognition tech ever goes mainstream, it could also provide a valuable source of data to marketers. Would you be comfortable with a company tracking your emotional responses?

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Stephen Edelstein
Stephen Edelstein
Contributing Editor
Stephen is a freelance automotive journalist covering all things cars. He likes anything with four wheels, from classic cars…
Officers confused as they pull over an empty self-driving car
Cruise

In what appears to be the first incident of its kind, police officers recently pulled over a self-driving car with no one inside it.

The incident, which took place on a street in San Francisco earlier this month, was caught on video by a passing pedestrian. It shows several traffic cops pondering about how to handle the incident after stopping the vehicle for failing to have its front lights on while driving at night.

Read more
How a big blue van from 1986 paved the way for self-driving cars
Lineup of all 5 Navlab autonomous vehicles.

In 1986, a blue Chevy van often cruised around the streets of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania near Carnegie Mellon University. To the casual observer, nothing about it appeared out of the ordinary. Most people would pass by it without noticing the camcorder peeking out from its roof, or the fact that there were no hands on the steering wheel.

But if any passerby had stopped to inspect the van and peer into its interior, they would have realized it was no ordinary car. This was the world's first self-driving automobile: A pioneering work of computer science and engineering somehow built in a world where fax machines were still the predominant way to send documents, and most phones still had cords. But despite being stuck in an era where technology hadn't caught up to humanity's imagination quite yet, the van -- and the researchers crammed into it -- helped to lay the groundwork for all the Teslas, Waymos, and self-driving Uber prototypes cruising around our streets in 2022.

Read more
Watch folks react to their first ride in GM Cruise’s driverless car
Two people taking their first ride in an autonomous car.

General Motors autonomous car unit, Cruise, has started to offer driverless rides to residents of San Francisco as it moves toward the launch of a full-fledged robo-taxi service.

Following a test run of the service last week, Cruise has released a video (below) showing the reaction of the very first passengers as they rode through the streets of the Californian city in a vehicle that had nobody behind the wheel.

Read more