According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple would have recently acquired a small startup called Emotient who based his business on the use of facial recognition technology for the advertising and marketing industry. Tests have even been done in the medical field for pain analysis as well.
In addition, the Emotient website promoted the ability of its technology to capture the emotional response direct from customers. The only doubt that assails me is how Apple will integrate this facial recognition based on emotions into the software to collect data without expressly affecting the privacy of the user, perhaps it previously warns that anonymous usage statistics will be taken with this technology in between ... we'll see.
In the words of the company itself:
The use of emotion recognition and its subsequent analysis are as varied and different from each other as the personality of our clients. Wherever there are cameras, you can't miss video analytics of expressions, an opportunity to learn about the customer's state and what they think as they respond emotionally to product and service marketing experiences.
The cost of this acquisition remains unknown, but according to all the information from different publications They seem to have confirmed the news. Even so, we already know that Apple is very interested in this type of technology since approximately four months ago it also bought another company from similar features called Faceshift, a Swiss company specialized in imaging based on three-dimensional motion capture. Even in 2010, Apple also acquired the Swedish facial recognition firm Polar Rose.
Apple's intentions are not clear yet, but seems to be something quite ambitious and not only as an integration of four new features counted in the next versions of the system, but it could even be extended to fields such as biometric security for example.