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Sunday, Aug 06, 2006

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Art that morphs to mimic your mood

Anand Parthasarathy

Electronic pictures that change with viewer's expression

MOOD MATCHER: The art (right) adjusts to the viewer's mood (left).

Bangalore: Researchers from the United Kingdom and the United States have collaborated to develop an electronic art that matches the mood of the viewer.

An attached web-camera captures the facial expression of the person looking at the digitised painting or photo on a PC or laptop. If the viewer is happy the colours are vibrant and cheerful. If he or she is sad or angry, it `morphs' subtly to darker hues that match the mood.

The work was carried out at the Computer Science Department of the University of Bath (U.K.) and the team included two research students from Boston University in the U.S. They call it ``Empathic painting'' and presented a paper on the subject at an International Symposium on Non-Photo-realistic Rendering and Animation in June this year. The aim is to create a novel interactive experience by using the emotional state of a viewer to create personalised art, explains team leader John Collomosse of Bath University. Creating the mathematical model that converts the facial expression of the viewer into a number that represents the degree of pleasure, was the work of Maria Shugrina and Margrit Betke of Boston University.

The project, while seeming to be a trivial application, is in fact part of an ongoing work to create some advanced tools for the computer graphics industry.

A description of the work and a link at: http://www.cs.bath.ac.uk/

vision/empaint/

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