Shmoodle
An online platform in which two participants communicate orally while doodling with each other virtually on a shared canvas, while the facial expressions of the users affect their brushes’ colors.
This project was presented at:
- ACM’s Creativity & Cognition Conference 2022 (Venice, Italy)
- IsraHCI Conference 2022 (Haifa, Israel)
Project Description:
Virtual communication has turned into a necessity in current culture. Although major technological breakthroughs were made in the past decade, virtual communication platforms do not prioritize the emotional connection between people.
Shmoodle is an audio and drawing platform connecting two remote users. Both users see the shared canvas and hear each other, with no display of their faces. Each user can draw on the canvas with a mouse or a touch screen, while they are conversing, and the drawing is displayed in real-time on both users’ screens. The color of the brush depends on the emotion detected in the drawing user’s face: neutral maps to white, happy (smiling) maps to yellow and sad (frowning) maps to blue.
When both users smile simultaneously, both of their brushes turn fluorescent pink and the background of the canvas turns a lighter bubblegum pink for the duration of their synchronized smiles. When one or both users stop smiling, their brushes return to the original coloring, and what they drew during the synchronous timespan remains fluorescent pink.
By Ariel Sagie and Michal Rinott
