STUDY #4

For this fourth study, we were confined to creating an interactive piece in which was primarily non-tactile, this posed quite a challenge, however, I was eager to give it my best attempt. I actually really enjoy working on these assignments with others as I have very limited knowledge of MAX so this gives me the opportunity to learn. This piece’s conceptualisation had to be focussed upon a particular emotion, my group decided to choose happiness, whilst simultaneously we noticed that our creation had the potential to also conversely prompt sadness/ sympathy. We discussed what could almost always evoke happiness and we figured simply cute dogs. The premise of the piece is that when a person (in view of the camera) shows a seemingly ‘happy’ face, which is most generally identified by characteristics such as raised eyebrows and a smile (we ultimately decided to program the piece more so directed by eyebrow movement) an image of a happy dog would appear and if a sad face was present, a sad image of a dog would be shown. In order to achieve this we decided to utilise facial recognition software (as the non-tactile aspect of this assignment). I understood that this temperamental software would pose many challenges, yet we were willing to give it our best attempt (as this study was considered to be just a draft) and then refine it as much as possible for the next more advanced/ evolved version. Technical issues included the software not being able to adequately monitor a face (or aspects of the face) to then present the information to MAX which would them trigger the change of images, problems also lay within MAX, being that there was a large trial and error process when selecting a range of numbers in which the software needs to recognise. Also being because of the many differences in individual faces, the software had to ideally re-calibrate for each individual, this is something we looked upon for the fifth study.