The Infinite Brief

Disney’s research team calls their new algorithm “factorized variational autoencoders” (FVAEs).

They claim the technology is so effective at recognizing complex expressions that, after analyzing a single audience member’s face for about ten minutes, it can even predict that face’s future expressions throughout the remainder of a film.

In order to build a dataset of millions of facial landmarks to feed into a neural network, researchers used infrared cameras to film the audiences of 150 showings of nine movies.