Emotion recognition technology is a code-based system that purports to identify a person's emotion by photographing their facial expressions and performing actions according to these identification. examples for places where this technology is commonly used are staffing companies, rating companies and security companies. This market is currently valued at about 20 billion dollar and is expected to be valued at about 25 billion dollar in the next five years. The main problem with this technology is that it relies on a controversial theory regarding the concept of “emotion”.

Emotion is the way we interpret the reality around us. Expressing emotion is the way we communicate our feelings to those around us. Two main psychological approaches deal with the question of what emotions are: the first claims that emotions evolved evolutionary and therefore are universal and identical in all human beings. The second approach argues that emotion is culture and context based and therefore it is not universal but perceived differently in different cultures.

The ‘Openface’ project is based on texts written by Jacques Lacan, describing the ‘symbolic stage’ in which the subject defines his world by a set of categories constructed by language. The project tries to break through the language framework and teach the machine a greater number of emotional categories and by doing so to rethink the ways a machine makes a decision

By building a repository of facial expressions that expands every time a person participates in the project, the system produces new definitions for emotions that do not exist in our language. The new emotions are compounds of facial expressions taken from different people who come from diverse backgrounds and differ in race, gender and age. These compounds, created as a collage, teaches the machine what the new emotion is.