Human emotions are complex and transitory, rendering them particularly difficult for us to model and predict. Typical approaches to emotion recognition tend to rely on simplistic and outdated theories. Namely, we assume the existence of a set of basic, innate, and universal emotion categories that have a unique fingerprint of expression. Recent research in neuroscience has revealed that ‘basic’ emotions such as happiness, anger and fear, are not ‘built-in’ to the brain. Instead, emotions are dynamically constructed from a number of more basic processes; we continuously construct our emotional state based on information from our senses, the context of a situation, as well as the emotion concepts we have available to us.
Language is not only a tool to express emotion, but has been found to be part of emotion perception. Mirror Ritual is an affective interface that engages you in the co-construction of your emotion through the use of machine-generated text. The interface appears as a standard framed mirror, with interaction triggered when a user is present. The mirror perceives your emotional state, informing the generated output which ultimately materialises as a poem on the surface of the mirror.
