Douwe Egberts Gives Coffee to the Weary
It might be a bit before our technology can read our minds, but it can already read our faces. As it turns out, that can be eerily close to mind reading.
Douwe Egberts, a Dutch coffee company, tested out a new sort of coffee vending machine at O.R. Tambo International Airport In South Africa. It had no buttons, no slot for payment, and no hints. As the video shows, however, it didn’t take weary travelers long to figure out how to get their coffee: they just did what weary travelers are wont to do and yawned.
Thanks to advanced facial recognition software, that was all the machine needed to dispense a piping hot coffee. A couple hundred people got their caffeine fix, the brand got international attention, and facial recognition technology earned a creative boost.
