Introduction
Facial Recognition technology has been a hot topic for a few years. With the help from libraries on Affectiva, we are able to create a game with emotion detector. We were asked to do the task that involved using facial recognition technology to promote one’s wellbeing.
Our Idea
When we got the topic, every one of us was excited and can’t wait to test out the basic program that was given to us. The program was able to detect emotion and facial expression for most of the time but it would fail a lot as well. So one of my teammates came up with the idea that we can develop a game. There are around 13 emojis in their given libraries. The purpose of our game is to match your facial expression to those randomly generated emojis. The player will receive different points when they are facing a different level of challenges. Some of them are really hard to imitate like one of the emoji requires the player to do frown and raise the eyebrows at the same time. So the player will get more points in situations like this and they will get fewer points when facing easy tasks, like a smiley face.
Because it is a challenging game, we do keep a record of highest score. And the final version will record player gaming experience and people can have fun watching the video later. This attracted lots of testers and they were able to conclude tricks to succeed in the game. Here is a chart including all our given emojis and rules about how to quickly match them.
Our Implementation
We would use JavaScript, HTML, and CSS to implement our project. Affectiva offered us a range of emojis which were in their libraries. We used those as a starting point. Our purpose is to make the game looks more fun and attractive. So we decided to use a bright scale of colors to put the game interface in an easy and happy mood. Our font choice and music choices were inspired by some old fashion games. Those nostalgic fonts made the gamer looks even cuter. The exciting 8-bit gaming music reminds me of Super Mario which traps gamers to keep challenging themselves. Here are our choices for font, user interface colors, and music.
Our Demo
Here is our final starting user interface. On the left side of the screen is where the emojis will be displayed and on the right screen will display you in the camera trying your best.
There is a total time limit for the game and an individual time limit for each emojis as well. If the player has been struggling the whole time or they got bored of the game they can always click the stop button or the reset button to restart. We named our game Matchi because it is a basic matching game.
We received a lot of positive feedbacks and they had fun playing the game. Some of them even tried more than three times just to beat each other on scores. We did a duo camera recording, one of the camera was recording the screen and the other was behind the laptop recording his face. A large portion of them said they enjoyed the music.
However, there were a couple of issues occurred. We realized that the glasses matters a lot. 90% of the emojis can’t be detected when the user was wearing glasses. The darkness and brightness in the room affect the result as well. In order to get higher scores, they used to shine a flashlight on the face since the brighter environment, the easier for the program to detect. Besides, some of those emojis doesn’t make sense. For example, no one ever does a frown face when they are sad. So we feel like if the emotion expression improved to be more similar to what people normally do, it would make a lot more sense.
Here is one of the demo video: