The Chameleon Project

On Thursday, I made another trip to the Dana Centre for a talk on Emotional Contagion.

The talk focused on The Chameleon Project, a project to produce a video art installation driven by the emotions of the audience.

The current stage of the project analyses the emotions of one member of the audience by following a set of points on that persons face to judge that persons emotional state ("mind reading technology" as they seem to like to call it). Based on the judgement of that persons emotional state the computer will choose an appropriate video response (single channel).

This is prototype 5 of 10. The final prototype they are aiming for multi-channel video of several different faces responding to the emotional states of the audience and is due to be completed in January 2010.

Will have to keep an eye on this to see the finished work.

More Info For Potential Stalkers

Rosie, pointed me the direction of some more interesting talks, this time at Goldsmiths' Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit, which I think I'll probably aim to go along to:

• Do psychology and Philosophy Need Each Other? - 3 March - I don't know a huge amount about either subject, but find both fascinating, so thought this might be interesting


• The Real X Files - 10 March - I hadn't even considered the fact that the UK MoD would have a UFO policy (it's normally the US and Roswell, etc that get mentioned when talking UFOs)


• Can Science Accommodate Psychic Experience? - 24 March - It will be interesting to hear how he feels these experiences fit with modern physics

Looks like you can just turn up to these without booking in advanced.

Also, have just booked a ticket to see Traces, which looks amazing.