The emotions are in. Now what?

I decided it was about time I implement the rest of the emotions (surprise and sadness). I sat down once again with my code consultant, Eric Festa, and we created them in Xcode. After minutes of mandible manipulation, we discovered that sadness wasn’t always as spot-on as anger/disgust, joy, and surprise. A quick search led us to Affectiva’s site, on which we found the following:

“The classifiers for emotions have ROC scores greater than or equal to 0.8, with expressions of joy, disgust, contempt and surprise the most accurately detected. Expressions of anger, sadness and fear tend to be more nuanced and subtle and are therefore harder to detect resulting in scores at the lower end of the range.”

It was reassuring knowing there was no fault in our code, but now we must figure out how to work around this issue. I want the app to be as glitch-less as possible so as to not irk the user. I will attempt to adjust the levels accordingly to make categories surprise and anger less significant (thanks to Dr. Nakra’s graphical expertise, I am able to visualize exactly what needs to be accomplished). This will keep me busy for the next week.

Additionally, I’ve been playing around with the opposite mode feature of the app. The opposite of joy is sadness, while the opposite of disgust/anger is…surprise? According to emotional valence graphs, anger and astonishment are pretty close opposites. I worry that this will not be intuitive to the users using opposite mode— will they be even more surprised when their surprise face triggers angry music? I hope to solve this through user testing the next week or two.

The playlists work (I just need to finish adding songs), but the videos sometimes lag at the start. I will also look into solves for this issue.