AI relaxes users with animal pics when getting tense at work
Keeping you from staring angrily at your work screen for hours.
Before continuing, here a little disclaimer: I am by no means a professional in the field of machine learning. I know my way around data science tools (Python and all it’s libraries for data collection, manipulation and visualisation, etc.), but this is my first real self made computer vision project after doing a series of amazing TensorFlow courses. (the one highlighted is not the only one I completed but it’s definitely my favorite). So take this article here with a grain of salt.
After completing these courses, I understood the problems of doing emotion detection from singles images because of the lack of contextual information. Yet I wanted to do a useful webcam-based project, likely using my face as the data source.
So as I set out to look for a problem to solve, I remembered how, back in pre-COVID times, my brilliant colleagues at NacarDesign used to point out my “angry screen face”. Using emotion detection on myself I realized that indeed more than 80% of the time I stared angrily at the screen.
To break this pattern I wrote a script that would make an image of a cute dog pop up whenever I looked too angry for more than 7 seconds. It worked… and what was even more surprising… after a few hours I felt more relaxed. (shout out to random.dog for being an amazing resource). For cat lovers, I would suggest using the script with thecatapi.com, or cataas.com/cat … the internet truly is wonderful.
I remembered a study stating that the physiological feedback from face muscles used to create a certain expression influences our emotional experience of that same expression. In other words, if you force our face into looking angry… you are more likely to experience a similar emotion. So by keeping myself from making a tense expression, I ended up being less tense in general. (: Turning that frown upside down :)
Later I added a simple script which makes my screen flash for a moment instead of showing me dog pics which ended up being a lot more practical in the long run.
Currently, this is just a simple python script so if anyone wants to take it to that next level feel free to grab the code on Github. (I preferred the dog pics so… if anyone knows a good trick to keep the doggies popping up without messing with my controls while I build a CAD model please let me know)
