Are you one of those people who laughs every time you see yourself in a mirror? If you are (or even if you’re not) you may be interested in a project presented at the International Multimedia Conference, 2007. A Dutch research team assembled a computerised camera/display system which emulated a mirror – but with built-in facial and vocal recognition software driving the user feedback.
“The intention of the mirror is to evoke positive emotions, to make people laugh and to increase the laughter.”
“After a session with the mirror, which generally takes a couple of minutes, the users receives a score card with their laughter statistics and a verbal description, accompanied with their picture.”
“The Affective Mirror tracks user’s emotional states, determines the desirability of this state, and supports the occurrence of desirable emotions. In this way, an affective human-machine interaction was realized, comprising reciprocal human-machine perceive-act cycles via intuitive, visual and auditory, dialogues. As mentioned in the introduction, we do not know other applications that encompass this complete cycle in the real world.“
The full paper can be viewed here : ‘Affective multimodal mirror: sensing and eliciting laughter’