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Lea Marolt Sonnenschein
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EmoBot

#machineLearning, #AI, #HRI, #playfulInteractionDesign, #socialBots

Can a robot teach you how to feel?

EmoBot is a tiny robot with a playful interface that challenges users to mimic its expression through positive and negative audio-visual reinforcements.

It shows a different face every time a user picks it up and shakes it. If the user mimics the emotion and expressions correctly, EmoBot rewards them with a heart emoji. And if they get it wrong... it shows a poop.



How to play?


Pick it up and shake it to get a random expression, then try to mimic it!


If the user shows the correct expression, EmoBot rewards them with a heart emoji and a satisfying success sound. If the user's face doesn't match, EmoBot responds with a snarky poop emoji and a failure sound.

After 3 successful trials, the user hears the level complete sound indicating that the game is over and they've won. If the user fails 3 times, they hear the game over sound, which encourages them to try again.


What’s the point?


  1. Explore how people engage with a playful robot telling them how to feel
  2. Learn more about physical computing, microcontrollers, and detecting sensory inputs

How is it made?


EmoBot is a 9V-battery-powered 8x8 LED Matrix and gets its smarts from an Arduino 101. Using the analog gyroscope sensor and the BLE communication feature, EmoBot changes its face when a user shakes it, and then wirelessly transmits that face to a custom iOS app through a BLE connection.

The iOS app grabs the EmoBot’s face, and uses the front-facing phone camera to detect the user's face and analyze their emotional characteristic using the Affectiva SDK in order to determine whether their expression matches EmoBot’s.





Convoluted minimalism


I enjoy making things that appear simple—maybe even silly—but that are actually fairly complex and powerful. I like making the interface disappear to make the communication between human and machine as seamless and friction-free as possible.

I like to think of this as, for a lack of a better phrase, convoluted minimalism —maximizing the complexity of building the product to minimize and simplify the end interaction and create a stellar experience.

Expressions


Below is the full array of faces EmoBot can display (some clearly better than others - there's only so much you can do with an 8x8 matrix...).



What’s with the poop?


  1. The shape of the poop emoji is almost the exact opposite of the heart emoji, so it makes for the perfect counterpart—together they are in harmony.
  2. I wanted a whimsical emoji so that the disappointment of losing wouldn't be too scarring. At least people would get a laugh out of it.
  3. I'm personally just a big fan…


Resources


GitHub
Affectiva SDK
Arduino 101 - CurieBLE
BLE for iOS tutorial, RayWenderlich
Fantastic Arduino tutorials
Gameplay video