#emoticap

EmotiCap Promo video

Here it is... the phenomenal video made by myself to show the world the wonders of the EmotiCap

To start with we were going to have the LEDs on the hat be like a "loading bar" of emotion. The more green, the calmer you are, the more red, the more angry/happy/emotive you are, like this:

We then decided as a group that this was a bit tacky, and could be misread, so have decided to change it so when the wearer's mood change, the LEDS flash red before returning to green. This makes it more obvious when there's been a change in mood.

We wanted to give the project a unique identity, and play on the steampunk lifestyle. We could have just used any old hat, but for us, it had to be a top hat. (Obviously, the fact that a top hat had the largest amount of room in it in which to put the arduino kit and sensors had nothing at all to do with out decision....) In any case, we are making the EmotiCap for the eccentric chap.

Here's the hat with a hole ready for the LCD, but yet to have any kit put in it:

And the same hat with the kit installed:

Then I took this dashing picture of team mate Chris Tough wearing the hat once we'd connected it all up:

With regards to our twitter page, I've copied this from the above hat-wearer, Chris Tough's blog, to explain how we got around twitter's privacy settings:

Due to Twitter updating its privacy settings in order to process a tweet you have to create an application through the dev.twitter site. The site then gives you an Object Authorisation Consumer key, Object Authorisation Consumer Secret, Access Token and an Access Token Secret. These need to be established in the code in order to access the account and post a tweet. 

We had to come up with some "moods" to display on the LCD screen. To keep things interesting, we made 3 mood thresholds, and for each we created an array of 4 different displays. I wrote these mood statements, they had to be short and punchy but get the idea across...

Now the hat is complete we took to uni campus to get people's reactions. 

To see what the wearers last mood was, please check out https://twitter.com/emoticap

Further Developments

To take this project further it would be great if each wearer could create his/her own moods via a website.

As the kit is very large, it would be better to create something without the mass amount of kit inside which would then be less costly and less likely to be damaged.

After setting up the twitter account (@EmotiCap), me being me, I just had to create a little logo and corresponding twitter profile page graphics to make it a little more aesthetic... here's the full page:

As you can see we have progressed! Lizzie spent many an hour figuring out Processing --> Twitter, for our needs. Now when the LCD screen prints out the wearer's mood, it's automatically tweeted to this account!

While Chris and myself figured out the LEDs breadboard wiring (fiddly!), Anish and Ben were with Hannah trying to get the Nexus 10 to cooperate. Hannah has some prerecorded data in a nice little .txt file for us, but we were hoping to demonstrate live EmotiCap in the project presentations... at the moment this is looking unlikely! We'll see how the next few days go.

I've been doing some research into WHY we're using galvanic skin response (GSR) as a way to test emotion... according to most medical sites it's the most commonly used emotion sensor, but some moods make our skin react very similarly. It's not a definitive test, as it mainly detects tension, which means happiness, anger, stress, fear and sexual arousal all produce similar numerical data from the GSR. However, as we're basing this project on gimmicks such as mood rings and the Fortune Telling Fish, the accuracy of mood detection is less important.

All tissues in the human body, including skin, have the ability to conduct electricity. Indeed, this is how nerves function to relay information from one part of the body to another. The skin also has electrical activity, which is in constant, slight variation, and can be measured and charted. The skin's electrical conductivity fluctuates based on certain bodily conditions, and this fluctuation is called the galvanic skin response.

Sudden changes in emotion, such as fright, can trigger this response, as can other types of changes, such as the hot flashes that are characteristic of menopause. The galvanic skin response can be graphed on a chart for observation, in the same way that heart or brain activity is recorded. Even though this is the case, it is impossible to detect the type of emotion or physical change that elicited the reaction by simply looking at the graph.

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-galvanic-skin-response.htm

iDAT301 EmotiCap arduino test - please excuse the audio!

Today we made progress! We've got the LCD to work (however at the moment it doesn't clear) and also got hold of some bi-colour red/green LEDs and got them to change colour at our command using a breadboard. We have another 4 LEDs on the way, and we're hoping to arrange them on the hat like a loading bar... the more red on display the more intense/angry your mood, the more green the more calm/happy.

It took a while to work out which wires did what, as to change the colour on the LEDs you have to change the current from one pin to the other. Also, getting our heads around using the breadboard was slightly confusing to start!

Test # 1!