Movie Genres and Taste Maps (and why they remind me of choosing Waffles or Eggs Benedict for breakfast)

A few days ago, I met a friend for breakfast at my favorite diner. While thinking about whether to order Belgian Waffles or Eggs Benedict, I suddenly had a flashback to elementary school science class. It was that lesson about the taste buds! You know – the taste map of your tongue with the salt, sweet, sour, bitter categories. I was confused by that map in elementary school and was still confused as I stared at the menu. I wasn't going to choose waffles or eggs just because one was sweet and one was salty.

It occurred to me that selecting a movie is a lot like deciding what you're going to eat for breakfast.

For me, genres like action, drama, or romance don't capture my movie taste any better than sweet and salty captures the difference between waffles and eggs Benedict. Movies are complex, and when I am trying to decide what movie to watch I am usually thinking something like: "Do I want an uplifting, happy-ending, formulaic Hollywood-type of movie or a car-chasing, high-energy thriller?"

At Nanocrowd, we've developed nanogenre™ movie categories – a method of describing movies in much more detail than simply drama or romance (you can find more information about our technology here). With nanogenre categories, people can choose movies the same way they choose breakfast. A "gangster, flashy, violence" movie or a "gripping, morality, fascinating" one?

Our website currently uses nanogenre categories for a one-at-a-time movie recommendation engine, but we are working on a new way to use these fine-tuned genres to create individual "taste maps" and suggest lots of movies all at once that that are automatically tailored to your taste.

Building Your Taste Map
To build your taste map, we begin with a list of the movies you have watched. Then we look into our collection of thousands and thousands of nanogenre categories and add a bunch of math to figure out why you watched those movies and which categories are right for you.

The result is a physical map of your taste, showing what types of movies you like and how they "cluster" around each other. Here is an example of "Rick's" taste map (the name has been changed to protect the innocent).

Click on the image (or here) to learn more.

For illustration, we circled the nanogenre categories that fall into more traditional genres like War and Romantic drama. The power of having Rick's taste map is that instead of just noticing that Rick likes Sci-fi action and Romantic comedies, we have broken those categories into much more specific groups of movies with descriptions like:

robbery, coolness, mastermind
future, humans, thought-provoking
comedy, touching, delight

Using these nanogenre categories, we can find lots of movies that are perfect for Rick.

At Nanocrowd, we are just starting to test an application that figures out viewers' taste maps and recommends collections of movies based on those maps. If you are feeling courageous and would like to join our Alpha testing program, let us know.

As for breakfast, I chose the waffles.

posted by Roderic March