The future is definitely here. Uniqlo has launched "UMood" in Australia, a program that will scan your brainwaves and pick a Uniqlo T-shirt out for you based on your mood. Not sure if this is a potential utopian or dystopian technology, but it's at the very least intriguing.
The device has customers sit in front of a screen wearing a brain-computer-interface headset and proceeds to show a variety of images and videos featuring everything from cute pets to thunderstorms. It then scans your neurological responses to the images and matches them to a short list of T-shirt designs via a fancy algorithm. According to some customers who tried it, there was a neuroscience professor present, Phil Harris from the University of Melbourne, who helped explain the technology in real time.
"The device essentially understands how closely a customer is resonating with a given mood and then uses that reading to pick the ideal T-shirt for a customer at that time," Professor Harris explained to the customers. The "moods" a particular T-shirt was associated with were determined by real Uniqlo customers, who rated 600 different T-shirt designs based on how closely they felt it resonated with a particular moods.
There's no word if "UMood" will come stateside any time soon, but it is currently touring select Australian Uniqlo locations.
