To my mind, the difference between computer vision and human vision lies in the situational awareness. Take Christian Möller’s Cheese installation as an example. It identifies:
a) whether the person is smiling
b) whether the smile is genuine.
Having said that, computer vision works through identifying emotion with a limited number of factors as opposed to humans, who take things like tiredness, personal matters, body language and other variables when evaluating happiness. Humans are able to build a more comprehensive image of others, because through previous experience they see things that computes may overlook. While reading about the LimboTime and examining the pictures I thought of something else that the computer may not account for. If the person is wearing white and is leaning back, their failure to compete the task may go unnoticed for two reasons: first, the line is invisible and not tangible and second, their the body may not be detected in its entirety. Similarly, if a person is bald, the computer will detect contrast in their face features as the highest point of the body and will shift the results.
Even though those are small errors that may occur they are worth mentioning when the topic is comparing human and computer.
A technique that could help the computer track what we are interested in would be to give more instructions. Instead of asking it to track mouth movement only, we could also add the gradual disappearance of the iris (as a sign of smiling) or a detector for the sound of giggling for example.
I think that computer vision, even though not revealed to its full potential, is a great thing to incorporate in interactive media. Even lower levels of interactivity allow for users to enjoy different products. Humans are simple creatures and they crave entertainment, be it in small amounts. I don’t believe its capacity is going to negatively affect humans or make them unsatisfied.