This LOL Verifier Confirms You Really Laughed Out Loud
WTF?! Let’s be honest: most of the time when we write LOL we don’t laugh out loud. The acronym has become the online equivalent of the real-life “heh,” which is said when one admits that what someone said was intended to be funny, just not funny enough to cause a laugh. However, a device has now been created that will only allow people to type LOL if they are actually laughing out loud.
Brian Moore decided to restore the authenticity of LOL by creating a verification device that connects to the keyboard and PC. Using a microphone attached to the collar, LOL Verifier checks to see if you actually laughed before replying. Users who laugh will be able to write an abbreviation and see a green light, a checked check mark, and a timestamp. Trying to write LOL without laughing will cause the red light to turn on and the words to be automatically replaced with something else – in this case, “this is funny.”
I made this thing called LOL Verifier: a device that only lets you type if you really laugh out loud. pic.twitter.com/Gsc63yGEm0
— Brian Moore (@lanewinfield) January 3, 2023
Moore says he trained the device on three minutes of his own laughter, or about 100 of them, using Edge Impulse’s machine learning development platform. The device itself uses a Xiao sense microcontroller and a Teensy 4.1 development board.
These days, the true meaning of LOL seems to be lost; many people, including this writer, often write something like “I did a real LOL” if something really makes them laugh. Moore’s device can give LOL the same effect as before, but the verifier can also cause users to fake laugh like in real life. What about when LOL is used sarcastically?
Surprisingly, LOL was the fourth most popular text acronym/abbreviation on Google in 2021, despite the fact that the acronym for Laugh Out Loud dates back to the 1980s. It was widely used in the nineties when mobile phones, many of which had fixed-text data plans, each with character limits, began to skyrocket in popularity, and LOL entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2011. Interestingly, LOL was the first. used as an initialism in the 1960s for Little Old Lady.
Moore has hinted at the next device he’s working on: the LMAO verifier. It’s not clear exactly how this will work, although it’s probably just a joke, in which case, LOL!
h/t: PC gamer
