STORY/

We live in a world that is full of different types of communications. The need for social skills increases as conversation and technology rapidly evolves around us and influences our behavior.

IDEA/

Social Clinic is an immersive installation discussing the emerging social issues in this digital world. We discover people’s potential social illnesses and provide them some conversation prompts to improve their social life.

We used clmtrackr and webcam.js to make the webpage. We printed the emotion score based on the coordinate positions of the face. When users hit “Submit” button, it takes screenshot, saves the score and then send to arduino (which is controlling the printer.)

It’s all about connecting different devices. Like how to send the data stored in javascript to arduino. And how to print the user input in the ticket.

Based on the emotional scores, we categorize our patients into three social illnesses. For example, if someone get high score on sadness, we assume he has the symptom of Social-awkwardness. We provide different prompts (social activities) for different type of social illnesses.

Visit our github for coding.

This is a public performance which involves the audience and illustrates the concept of Social Clinic and how does the installation work.

We brought our clinic to life in Internet Yami-ichi Flea Market. Other than Face Ray, we improvised our service with a online survey before the face-recognition. A series of questions related to patients’ social lives need to be answered for a more accurate diagnosis.

We charged $1 for each diagnosis, $2 for medicine which is a sticker with a prompt on it. Patients can paste on their body which allows them to interact with others in the exhibition as a way to cure their social illness.

HYPERALLERGIC

Diagnose Your Social Issues with Facial Recognition Technology

New York Times

Stylus