Comedy club uses iPad facial recognition to charge by the laugh

A Barcelona comedy club brings rationality to humor. How funny.

Will customers deliberately stop laughing at later acts, in order to save money? Edudu/Vimeo screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET

Seventeen laughs, eight giggles, four guffaws and one snort till the snot slipped into your cerveza? That'll be 6.6 euros, please.

This, I imagine, was the sweet sound of the checkout at one Barcelona comedy club, after it took the bold step of charging its customers not for the fun, but for every single sign of humor.

The Teatreneu Club thought it might be an amusing experiment -- a sort of world first -- to give willing customers an iPad equipped with facial recognition technology that captures every laugh. The iPads are attached to the seat in front and keep score of the laugh total.

The charge per laugh is 0.30 euros. The Teatreneu Web site says that there is a maximum charge of 8 euros for its latest performance, though the BBC reports that the maximum was, in the past, 24 euros.

The idea was a reaction to increased government taxes on theatrical performances, which severely hit revenue. Pay-per-laugh was a big success, with other venues copying the idea.

I worry, though, about this incursion of rationality into an increasingly invaded emotive world.

Might it be the case that later acts will suffer, because patrons will become stingy with their laughs, feeling that they've spent enough? Or could the opposite happen, with the audience withholding expenditure early before actually parting their lips and therefore parting with their cash?

Or might they simply reach the maximum early and let later laughs be acts of freedom?

Regardless, as the video above suggests, laughter might be merely one criterion for artistic charging. Many rationalists surely look forward to the day when a Nicholas Sparks movie is pay-per-sniffle or a summer blockbuster is pay-per-teenage-boy's-whoa-emission.

Restaurants, too, are in the entertainment business, so what's stopping them from charging by the belch or fart?

In the end, data will be the death of us. In the meantime, let's bathe in the joys of paying to learn about ourselves.

That'll be $370, please. Oh, didn't I mention? I'm charging by the word.

Chris Matyszczyk Chris Matyszczyk is an award-winning creative director who advises major corporations on content creation and marketing. He brings an irreverent, sarcastic, and sometimes ironic voice to the tech world. See full bio

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In the future, we could charge wearables by chewing

Chew faster! We need more power! Smart Materials and Structures/IOP Publishing

Walking around with more devices, whether they're wearables or in your pocket, means more worries about keeping all those batteries charged. But you may not always need to hunt for an open outlet to pump some more juice into smaller devices, thanks to the work of some Canadian researchers. Instead you could just have lunch, preferably something chewy -- and don't hesitate to talk while you eat, too.

The researchers, from the École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS), an engineering school in Montreal, have developed a chin strap that can harvest energy from jaw movements, including eating, chewing and talking. Results of testing the device were published this week in the journal Smart Materials and Structures.

That's right game addicts, soon you may be able to keep your wireless Oculus Rift strapped to your cranium and stay in the game while you pound down that hoagie and know that you're actually extending your game time while you chew.

The chin strap is made up of piezoelectric fiber composites, a smart material composed of integrated electrodes and an adhesive polymer matrix that creates an electrical charge when stressed by jaw movements. Piezoelectric technology is nothing new -- we've seen similar smart shoes and even a proposal for roads that harness their own vibrations to create power -- but the stretchy power-generating textile is a novel approach that could make sense as we enter the bold new world of wearables.

By the way, we're not just talking about those new, hyped wearables like the Apple Watch or Google Glass. More practical applications might be to use this kind of tech to charge things like hearing aids and cochlear implants. But the researchers say there's still more work to be done before that becomes a reality.

"Given that the average power available from chewing is around 7 microwatts, we still have a long way to go," study co-author Aidin Delnavaz said in a release. "However, we can multiply the power output by adding more PFC layers to the chin strap. For example, twenty PFC layers, with a total thickness of 6mm, would be able to power a 200-microwatt intelligent hearing protector."

A single PFC layer currently costs about $20, which could make a 20 layer strap a little pricey, but the researchers say the device would also pay for itself in a few years by saving users the cost of expensive replacement batteries.

If this takes off, people might go back to using their phones for actual phone calls, if for no other reason than to charge their batteries through gabbing.

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