A pair of smart glasses designed to track emotions is being developed by a UK-based company, which hopes to release the device at an as-yet unspecified time in 2026.
The Sense glasses by Brighton-based Emteq Labs firm with sensors that can detect facial movements with microscopic detail, and can be used for mental health and food consumption monitoring. The device sends the facial movement data to an app, so you can check your own emotions on your phone.
The device is billed by Emteq as, “the world’s first eyewear that combines wireless non-contact sensors with a machine learning platform, enabling you to effortlessly collect and analyse facial data and activities.”
While facial movement-related technology such as eye-tracking is not particularly new in VR and mixed reality headsets, and other ‘smart’ devices, a pair of smart glasses designed to analyse emotions on a deep level could offer new insights. Although the Sense has not been designed with virtual sex in mind, a device with its abilities could potentially be used for remote intimacy, offering more accurate emotional feedback between partners.
How will the Sense glasses work?
Inward-facing sensors on the Sense glasses monitor the electrical activity of muscle groups on your face, including muscles used for smiling plus those that control brow and forehead movement. Along with heart rate and head movement data, the data from these movements is sent to a smartphone app, promising to give a record of your emotions.
“Our AI engine translates that information and provides insights into emotional expressivity, behavioural changes and stress responses on demand,” Emteq says.
The company says that the device could have uses in multiple industries, and has placed large focus on the glasses’ ability to track chewing, to offer eating and health insights. The glasses use ChatGPT-4o to help analyse the food the device captures you eating.
If Sense glasses were able to provide accurate instant emotional information, the device could be used to make metaverse avatars depict more accurate real-time emotions. We might be getting a bit ahead of ourselves here, but it’s not too hard to envisage a sex robot one day depicting complex facial emotions when synced with a Sense-wearing human.
A device that garners deep emotional information as data and sends it to synced devices would have to offer super-solid privacy. The question of how accurately it could record emotions based on physical movement would need to be answered, too, with emotion being displayed facially in many different ways across different cultures and personalities.
Prototype images of the glasses show that they look similar to ‘real’ glasses, rather than clunky VR headsets.
Steen Strand, Emteq’s CEO, told LifeHacker that”a lot of existing technology, particularly in VR, is just more heavy on power and computing. We’re using these very lightweight, low-power sensors that just look at a little tiny part of your face, and from that we can infer what your whole face is doing.”
Emteq plans to release a version of the Sense glasses in 2026, but the company hasn’t decided if it will release them to consumers or to tech industry researchers.
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