Smart Eye is a Swedish high-tech company in Gothenburg. They develop and sell products for eye tracking and driver monitoring systems, and have just bought emotion-detection software startup Affectiva for USD $73.5m in a cash-and-stock deal.
Boston-based Affectiva, which spun out of the MIT Media Lab in 2009, has developed software that can detect and discern human emotion, which Smart Eye is keen to combine with their own AI-based eye-tracking technology. The companies’ founders see an opportunity to expand beyond driver monitoring systems and into the rest of the vehicle. Together, the technology could help them break into the emerging interior-sensing market, which can be used to monitor the entire cabin of a vehicle and deliver services in response to the occupant’s emotional state.
Smart Eye will help Affectiva move beyond the development and prototype work and into production contracts. Smart Eye has won 84 production contracts with 13 automakers, including BMW and GM. Smart Eye, with offices in Gothenburg, Detroit, Tokyo, and Chongqing, also has a division that provides research organizations such as NASA with high-fidelity eye tracking systems for human factors research.
