Exploring Emotion Recognition

Created with Processing

Machines see faces differently to humans. Where we perceive them holistically, machines look for simple shapes and lines.

Using Processing’s DeepVision library, this project highlights how AI reduces complex and fluid human emotions into a very simple one-word label, e.g. happy, sad.

As users interact, they express emotions to the camera and observe how the AI responds by changing the colour of the screen. If two people are present, their emotions blend into a shared visual environment.

The AI also detects emotions in a simple foam head with wires attached, which highlights the gap between human feeling and machine interpretation, and what gets lost in translation when feelings are filtered through code.