(Newswire.net — October 10, 2014) — There is no entrance fee to the club, but each laugh is charged to customers from $0.38 per one laugh, to a maximum $30 for 80 laughs.
During the show, customers can review how much they spent and afterwards post their results on their social media profiles.
The facial recognition software is tracking facial movements and keep score every time member laughs. It is not yet clear if it counts just smiles as well.
Since this unique advertising experiment started, the club has increased the number of viewers per show by about 40 percent.
As reported by the BBC, other similar clubs in Spain are now following the steps, hoping that they will also see an increase in customer figures.
It is unclear which software is being used nor how accurate it is.
Some facial recognition algorithms identify facial features by extracting landmarks, or features, from an image of the subject’s face.
However, face recognition is not perfect and struggles to perform under certain conditions.
“Face recognition has been getting pretty good at full frontal faces and 20 degrees off, but as soon as you turn sideways, there’ve been problems.” says Ralph Gross, a researcher at the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute.
Other reason why face recognition might not work properly include poor lighting, sunglasses, light glare, long hair, or other objects partially covering the subject’s face, which is common condition in the clubs.
Another serious disadvantage is that many systems are less effective if facial expressions vary. That means that even a big smile can render the system less effective, so face recognition software in Spanish comedy theatre was probably calibrated as laugh recognition.
Critics of the technology complain, referring to London Borough of Newham security system disaster, when the system running for years, failed to recognize well known criminals, despite them showing up in the security databases.
An experiment in 2002 by the local police department in Tampa, Florida, had similarly disappointing results.
A facial recognition system at Boston’s Logan Airport was shut down in 2003 after failing to make any matches during a two-year test period.