Remember the memory-erasing Neuralyzer in “Men in Black”? Or more recently, “Ex Machina,” the Oscar-winning story of a humanoid robot that uses emotional persuasion to outsmart humans and escape from the secluded home of its creator? While movies have been envisioning crazy, new technology for decades, some of those inventions are starting to become reality. From virtual reality and wearable devices to facial and emotional recognition technologies, these products and systems are changing the way we communicate, interact and conduct market research (MR) in several industries, most notably, retail.

One of the hottest areas of technology development in retail research is facial and emotion recognition. Understanding emotions is powerful in areas of research such as ad testing, but difficult to achieve. Facial expressions are linked to emotions, and research organizations have used human observation of recorded videos in retail settings to try to assess emotional response for years. Human assessment has many limitations, and facial expression recognition technology offers an opportunity to overcome some of these limitations, delivering a much greater level of insight about personal sentiment and reactions.

Organizations managing research programs and companies like VIBEcx in the retail customer experience space are using emotion detection technology to analyze people’s emotional reactions at the point of experience. This knowledge not only gives researchers a greater understanding of behavior patterns, but also helps predict likely future purchasing actions of that consumer.

The result? Remarkable insight into what impacts customer emotions, as well as valuable information that can drive better business decisions, resulting in improved product and service offerings and experiences.

Emotion detection software simply adds to the toolkit available to retailers who are looking to improve their customer experiences and create more effective advertising campaigns. It may further reduce the need for focus groups, but beyond that, it’s an addition, not a replacement. Such videos will, in most cases, be embedded into a survey, and additional information will be required to understand more about the shoppers themselves.

No doubt new applications of the software will emerge in both MR and customer experience disciplines – some of which will fly and some of which won’t. As with most advances of the last decade, emotion detection will find its place and help forward-thinking retailers add additional value to the services they provide to their customers. In turn, this will ideally help progress the retail space, helping retailers take their abili