Biometric Social Interaction

Biometric Social Interaction @ Thoughtmade

2010-05-15T15:15:00.001-07:00

Biometric Social Interaction @ Thoughtmade
Originally uploaded by geekphysical

GeekPhysical attended Thoughtmade, a gathering of creative innovators at a culture nightclub (Inkonst) in Malmo, Sweden. We presented ourselves, and our thoughts on pushing the amazing stuff going on in the Oresund region (Copenhagen & Malmo) out into the world and encouraged people to start exploring, tinkering, and making things! We had a fabulous time and are very happy to be part of such an important movement. www.thoughtmade.com

"Cold Feet" bouquet goes to Brazil, and on TV!

2010-02-05T08:21:00.000-08:00

GeekPhysical's Interactive Wedding Bouquet, "Cold Feet" has premiered on Brazilian TV on their biggest daily television show, Mais Voce!

We lent the bouquet to a set of Wedding fairs in Brazil, "Bridal & Fashion Expo, the largest fair of marriages in Brazil, which has been operating for 16 years" and have been featured on TV!

You can see the show here although it's in Portuguese. It starts talking about the bouquet at about 3:35.

Text below roughly translates as:

* Bouquet shows humor of the Bride: Bridal Expo & Business, in partnership with GeekPhysical of Denmark, brought this issue with a uniquely innovative and unusual bouquet. Called Galvanic Skin Response Bouquet, the bouquet has LEDs that light up as the mood of the bride at the altar. If it's calm, he turns blue. In her case be nervous at the altar, the light emitted is white. This is possible because two sensors are connected to the bride to measure heart rate and body temperature. All data is stored in a memory card of 1 GB.

Thank you Yris!

BioMapping with GSR

2010-01-15T05:00:00.000-08:00

We found this fantastic piece by "Christian Nold, a London-based artist, used GPS coordinates coupled with a device that measured participant’s galvanic skin response as they walked through a designated urban area."See Biomapping site here

As much as we're interested in facilitating biometric SOCIAL interaction, we think its really interesting to think about how "emotional location data" (as Nold terms it) could set the stage for places within a city. Perhaps one is looking for an area where high emotions exist, you could find areas of high excitement, of frustration, of peacefulness, and depending on your goal (avoiding frustration while driving) you could plan your route, or even your social interactions with this concept. Imagine you’re looking to socially interact with others so you visit the high excitement area and find like-minded people interested in discussing and playing with biometric responses. It could be a fantastic venue, even if it’s just a street corner, well known for its emotional qualities.

Since we also like to explore proximity and heart rate, we wonder what happens if these elements are added to Biomapping - perhaps people can see when they were most exerted during the day (a long walk to work in heels?) or where both their emotions and heart rate peaked, perhaps an encounter with a friend, in which case, the proximity sensor would be of interesting note. Some fun thoughts to consider!

Nice work Mr. Nold we look forward to hearing more about this!

Project Cold Feet

2010-01-11T13:32:00.001-08:00

GSR Bouquet
Originally uploaded by geekphysical

So this was written a day before the wedding, but now two days after the wedding, I am finally able to post it! Enjoy!

The couple (who met creating a critical corset that tightens when the wearer's heart rate goes up) have decided to take the leap and get married! We of course love biometrics and geekery and thus have decided that our wedding needs to be equally geeky. We've been working hard on taking our biometrics project into a new realm, detecting wedding emotions and datalogging the entire day.

We're able to see at a glance, if the bride gets cold feet, or is just very excited by her bouquet. The bouquet is implanted with fibre optics, lit by two bright LEDs, one blue, one white. The LEDs show changes in Galvanic Skin Response. As emotion swings from relaxed (blue) to alert (white) the fibre optics will gently glow and the bouquet will display the colors accordingly. The bouquet will be composed of all white flowers, lilies and orchids to make sure that the lights are visible.

At the same time, heart rate is recorded for both bride and groom on the datalogger.

The datalogger, from Sparkfun, a "LogoMagic 2" is recording analog signal directly on to a 1GB SD card. The analog signal it's getting is both the heart rate signal from an optical heart rate sensor (see our post here about this - http://geekphysicalbiometrics.blogspot.com/2009/09/designing-glove.html) and the data from Galvanic Skin Response - GSR - (read, emotional state) measured from two electrodes touching the skin. The heart rate optical measure, an LED and a photo transistor and the two electrodes for the GSR are housed in a velcro strap that sits, most appropriately, on the wearer's ring finger. It could of course be on any finger, but this is simply the most fun.

The bride holds the bouquet and has the 'ring' on her left hand ring finger. The datalogger is housed in the base of the bouquet with the wire wrapped around the bouquet base so she slides her finger into the ring and holds on to the bouquet all at the same time. The groom has his datalogger on his wrist, held in place by a wrist band, under his tuxedo arm.

Data can be recorded on the 1GB SD card for up to 15 days but we'll just be recording the one, from morning until the late hours of the night.

We've also placed proximity sensors (using infrared) on the two dataloggers so we can see how many times throughout the day we're side by side, or far apart.

Many more photos coming as soon as we pick up the bouquet, in the meantime, check these out!

Video! Blip.tv: http://blip.tv/file/3082759 OR youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k89BoX2AxhM

"Undercover"
by Citizen Nyx

Citizen Nyx / CC BY 3.0

SCHEMATIC for GSR & HR: http://jump.fm/VXDTG

BSI Video

2009-11-07T04:31:00.000-08:00

Festival della Creativita

2009-10-15T02:26:00.001-07:00

IMG_5440
Originally uploaded by geekphysical

Our first test run after setting up our exhibition at Festival della Creativita. Everyone looked cool in their shades hooked up with IR gaze detection, and followed their heart beat and GSR streams flowing from one person to another. The festival begins today and its been a hard two days getting this booth in order! We're doing the last touches of tweaking the program and locking everything down (theft is popular in Italy!). We have some great neighbors - check out their video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGvwP4QyLcA and another neighbor who is specializing in projecting interactive graffiti! (http://tangibleinteraction.com/)

BSI - Hardware

2009-10-08T22:51:00.001-07:00

Biometric Social Interaction
Originally uploaded by geekphysical

The hardware is complete! A victory after three weeks of working insanely hard (well one of us working insanely hard and the other being an excellent non-hardware expert kinda cheerleader).
A quick rundown of what's in the photo:
Sunglasses have infrared sensor/receiver. Finger hold has galvanic skin response sensor and heart rate sensor. All cased within a sexy black box!

Participants will place the finger sensor on their index finger, and it will receive heart rate/galvanic skin response data and the sunglasses have an IR sensor so when people look at each other, it registers.

Hardware built, some much appreciated help from our friend Jonas (check out his site: http://www.halfdanj.dk/) on the software and away we go! .... well soon. A few more things to be done first. But then we go! :) Festival della Creativita here we come!

Biometric Social Interaction

2009-09-16T13:58:00.001-07:00

Biometric Social Interaction
Originally uploaded by geekphysical

We're getting there! The sunglasses have an infrared sensor/receiver so we can have 'gaze detection' - even when you're wearing dark sunglasses and think no one can see you checking them out - well they still can tell when you're sneaking a peek!

The two metal buttons measure skin resistance to give us our Galvanic skin response and the photo resistor is housed in between them.

Finally, the black box contains an Arduino board with five resistors and three capacitors, all the hardware required to run this entire installation - the rest is software and extensive filtering!

Schematics coming soon!

Designing the glove

2009-09-03T18:03:00.001-07:00

A hand based sensor system to sense heart rate and galvanic skin response. Part of the biometric social interaction system designed by GeekPhysical.

The two copper rings - which will eventually be stainless steel so that anyone can use them without risk of allergy - are designed to pick up the difference in resistance in the skin. A change in resistance can, according to research in Galvanic Skin Response, indicate a change in emotion or state within the wearer.

The index finger cover houses an LED and a photo transistor. The LED shines light on your finger, and the photo transistor measures the amount of light passing through your finger. As blood pulses through your finger, the amount of light seen changes, (the light intensity changes) and the photo transistor records values. This indicates heartrate.

Our next step is a)Making a glove and b)exploring EEGs through adaptation of the OCZ Neural Impulse Actuator, which we're working on trying to get the data out of. Currently, its a game controller, but we want to get the values of the different brainwaves so we can study the changes as people socially interact.

Festival della Creativita and some research

2009-07-19T10:58:00.000-07:00

We are so excited to have been accepted to Festival della Creativita (http://www.festivaldellacreativita.it/) in Florence, Oct. 15-18, 2009. They needed something around Interaction Design and social interaction and we are very eager to develop the Biometric Social Interaction (BSI) system further.

For this festival, our first thought was to create a structured experience wherein people come in and have meetings and record their biometric data but we're not so sure structured is the way to go. Instead, we'll concentrate on the experience of discovering your biometric self. We'll set it up in workshop style, giving people the opportunity to play with different types of sensors and to create their own biometric 'footprint' (for lack of a better term). We're still brainstorming so comment or email geekphysical@gmail.com if you have ideas!

We've been exploring some interesting articles. Wired featured "Know Thyself: Tracking Every Facet of Life, from Sleep to Mood to Pain, 24/7/365" by Gary Wolf recently and it has some great insights into self-tracking and recording biometric information. We're taking this into consideration; our data isn't scientific, its an approximation, though Dzl has mad crazy filtering skills, it will still be an approximation and certainly nothing to base one's lifestyle habits on but it will be interesting to look at Gary's suggestions of bias, and random recording as a solution to people being biased about their own recording. This article stemmed from one about the Nike+ system and people tracking their running stats.

We recognize the multitude of tracking going on, and were enlightened to a lot more types of tracking through Gary's article but our focus remains strong - how does biometric data change, inspire or affect in some way, social interaction? How do people's attitudes and communications change as a result of knowledge of their biometric data?

We continue to brainstorm....

Flirting in Sweden

2009-07-19T10:26:00.001-07:00

Our biometrics system started with the Critical Corset, but upon realizing that heart rate alone wasn't going to give us enough feedback we moved forward; heart rate plus temperature was the first adventure.

At the Half Machine event in the summer of 2008 we set up a booth where people could see their heart rate and temperature broadcast visually across a wall. We played a little game where people would try to entice Dzl's heart rate and temperature into going up and some people tried on the system. It was fun and taught us a lot about people's willingness to try new strange things. For one, it was difficult to convince them to put on a bunch of wires, and as a second thing, personal boundaries are easily crossed once biometrics are involved. People, random strangers were hugging and petting the wearer hoping to elicit a response. Very interesting. But some improvements needed to be made.

Photo below from video of Half Machine 2008 exploration of biometrics:

Taking it to the next level:

We knew that we had to change the system to make people feel more comfortable using it so we made it wireless, furthermore we developed two systems that could be worn simultaneously so two people could run around the room, interacting with each other, or with others, and their results could be individually displayed. So we created two tiny boxes, each with a radio transmitter inside and two electrodes attached. The wearer would put the electrodes on their chest, the wires would go to the match-box sized box in their pocket and the signal would transmit to a receiver in the center of the room.

Box with electrodes.
Wireless receiver.

We took this entire ensemble to a networking event in Sweden, Creative Clash (creativeclash.se). Here, there was already an expectation that people could interact and share information, since it was a networking event. We thought it might spice things up a bit to have something to initiate conversations, an "excuse for conversation" as the wise Neil Strauss might explain. People had something interesting to look at, a projection of two different colored heart beats with temperature readings beside them. Now the tricky part was to find some willing participants to supply those heart rates. Our first courageous people were a trio of guys, sitting together enjoying a beer, but slightly off to the side, and not really networking as much as they could be. After some convincing one agreed to wear the system, and after observing his information with his friends, began quickly to figure out that he could use this as a conversation starter. The following takes place:

- Approaches girl
- Guy:"Hi there, you see that heart rate up there? That's mine"
- Girl: "Wow, that's cool how are you doing that?"
- Guy: Explains what he's wearing
- Conversation ensues, followed quickly by the magic words "Lets see if we can change my heart rate, get it up higher maybe?"

Now of course this isn't verbatim but it did happen many times throughout the night with many wearers of the system; people suddenly lost their fear of talking to others since they had such an intriguing subject to talk about and they could present *themselves*, biometrically, they could be affected, and it would be interesting.

Our two guys, being admired by a flock of beautiful Swedish girls who are enthralled by the biometric readings.

So now we had an interesting thing going on: people intrigued by their biometrics, and this is just heart rate and temperature. We even had a doctor in the house that night who brought up the topic of "what if you could see who was healthy or unhealthy, would there be social responsibility for people in the room if they could recognize it, would they be more or less attracted to the person who's biometrics that was?" it was a good question and got us thinking that maybe people should be judged by their insides rather than their outsides.

We wear clothes, put on makeup, take care of our skin, all in the aim of looking more healthy, more attractive, taking care of ourselves. But how many of us actually take care of ourselves, eat correctly, get exercise, take care of our mental states? Far less than put on makeup or cologne each morning. So what if we judged people (and yes, everyone unless they are some kind of saint judges others by their appearance, it's human nature!) ... if we judged them biometrically instead of by their clothes, hair or skin, but rather by their heart rate, temperature, skin response, or eeg readings?

Going back to the corset, what if we measured attraction or human relations that way?

These are the beginning of our questions and we hope to explore them much more deeply in the months to come.

Critical Corset

2009-07-19T10:14:00.000-07:00

As a person's heart rate rises, the corset will tighten, automatically ensuring the practice of standing up taller by tightening the stomach and enhancing the chest, and indicating to the wearer, before they are cognitively aware, that they are attracted to someone.

Using a corset kindly donated by Femme-Fatale.dk this project has been developed to explore the the fascinating subject of attraction. How do we know when we are attracted to people? How does our body respond? What factors are present and how are they shaped by our surroundings?

Concept
How does the physiological effects of being attracted to someone translate into a tangible result, how can one be more aware of the moment of attraction? These questions were asked in the design of this concept – if a corset, which has been both celebrated and criticized throughout history, can indicate to the wearer that their heart rate has risen, what effect will that have on their social and physical behavior and the behavior of people around them?

Technology
Using a Polar Heart Rate monitor and receiver chip, the heart rate of the wearer was successfully interpreted using the Arduino board. If the wearer was relaxed and their heart rate rose above a certain level, they would feel the result as a tightening of the corset through the use of air being pumped into an inner lining in the corset. This would stay inflated, squeezing the user, until they became relaxed enough, and lowered their heart rate again, and would then deflate.

Outcomes
It is determined that the causation is disharmonious, it was difficult to tell if dancing, drinking caffeinated beverages, or simply ascending stairs could be outside causes of heart rate increasing. However, when stationary, and in close proximity to another, it was obvious to both individuals when the heart rate would rise or fall, as the pump could be heard starting.

Questions
Is conditioning possible with this wearable device? Would the wearer become so used to being squeezed when aroused that one could create a physical attraction, enabling the wearer to have a physical experience, the sensation of being squeezed gently, without the device at all? Would the wearer become more in tune with their body, would they learn to control heart rate, and eventually control their emotive and physiological states?

Many thanks to Femme-Fatale.dk for their generous support of this project!

Video Documentation