During my travels of the last year, people at Microsoft gave me a full demonstration and run-through of the abilities and affordances of the Kinect camera and the Xbox One. One guy showed me realtime take of the camera reading the heartbeats of the people in the room. As he was doing it, I stepped behind him and loudly clapped my hands. I watched his heart rate spike on the big screen. Discussed potentials for this technology included, yes, learning when people were getting hyped up by action movies, but also registering excitement caused by advertisements.

Here’s a fun idea. Remember Facebook’s experiment in emotional contagion? Deliberately setting some people’s Facebook timelines to show only sad things, to see what it did to them? Imagine an emotional-contagion experiment where they could access your heartrate off your smartwatch too.