The Hairpin Offices? :)

Everyone knows what it feels like to walk into a lobby or onto a subway platform and instantly feel the “vibe” of the place — happy, sad, mad, desperate, relaxed. What are we intuiting so clearly and instantly about the mood of an entire group of people? “Mood Meter,” an installation created by MIT Media Lab, takes this ineffable experience and makes it tangible by displaying the mood of an entire public space as a real-time infographic…

Mood Meter uses cameras and facial recognition technology to log how many people in a room are smiling from moment to moment. The information is then parsed by a laptop and re-displayed as a live video feed of the room with cartoon faces superimposed over all of the inhabitants.

Someone invented a giant billboard version of that “Smile, girl! What, you can’t smile?” dude you snarl at every morning on your way work. The “neutral” face skews a little depressing in emoticon form, right?