"Harvesting" emotions

A few days ago, I read a very interesting post on events managers blog about the efforts of two companies, Aralia Systems and Machine Vision Lab for the development of a tool which will “harvest emotions”. Although the aim of this technology will be the monitoring of cinema audience reactions to films and adverts, it may be applied in other areas as well, such as the event evaluation.

Events cost huge amount of money to companies, while there is much concern about the effectiveness of their performance evaluation. The most common used method is the completion of feedback forms by the attendants, but practice shows that this approach doesn’t provide reliable info.

Some more sophisticated methods that have been also developed in an effort to assess event success, include calculations such as expense to revenue ration (E:R) or Activity Based Metrics (number of visitors, number of sales appointments confirmed etc.).

Its obvious therefore, that the development of a software that will be capable of reporting the reactions of an event’s participants, would be the ultimate tool for having a precise picture of the event's success or not.

But in the name of business profit do we have the right to penetrate in the deeper thoughts and feelings of people? Which level of profit can justify such an action? What about the personal freedom? Its not enough people to be informed that they will participate in such programs in order event organisers to have their consent. Legislation owes to protect citizens from initiatives that will put in danger unquestionable rights that generations have frighten for.