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Electronic Art Changes to Suit Mood of Viewer 66

Posted by Zonk from the anyone-see-anti-trust dept.
BFlatSeven writes "Reuters reports that 'British and American computer scientists have developed artwork that changes according to how the viewer feels. Special software picks up facial cues and adapts the color and brush strokes of the digital image.' The University of Bath has some pictures of the painting in action as well as a video and an abstract written by the creators."
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Electronic Art Changes to Suit Mood of Viewer More

Electronic Art Changes to Suit Mood of Viewer

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  • Holy Shit (Score:3, Funny)

    by incest ( 622529 ) on Saturday August 05, 2006 @05:30AM (#15851480)
    How are they going to know I want to see hardcore erotica featuring members of all four Star Trek shows in zero-G sex? If they can make this work, I'll order a dozen!

    • Re:Holy Shit (Score:2, Informative)

      by kfg ( 145172 ) *
      If they can make this work, I'll order a dozen!

      They could make this work. The problem is that they aren't at all concerned about what you want to see. It merely relects your mood, just a fancy mood ring, rather than showing you what your mood might want, nevermind what might be appropriate for your mood.

      KFG

      • Re:Holy Shit (Score:3, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Then again, a proper image analyzer could interpret hair, hygiene, degree of obesity and presence vs. lack of an "alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die" shirt, and draw the appropriate conclusions.

      • Re:Holy Shit (Score:5, Insightful)

        by marcello_dl ( 667940 ) on Saturday August 05, 2006 @07:05AM (#15851615) Homepage Journal
        The other problem is that I and possibly other people prefer hard-wired art, you know, the good ol' idea of art provoking emotions, not responding to them.

        • Re:Holy Shit (Score:4, Funny)

          by kfg ( 145172 ) * on Saturday August 05, 2006 @07:15AM (#15851632)
          What an increadibly early twenty first century point of view.

          This is two thousand and six, man. Get with the times.

          KFG
        • "The other problem is that I and possibly other people prefer hard-wired art, you know, the good ol' idea of art provoking emotions, not responding to them."

          What exactly is the "problem" with this? Some people prefer art consisting of pretty landscapes, some prefer art symbolizing man's eternal struggle to understand himself, some prefer art featuring dogs playing poker, some prefer art that abstractly conveys the artist's mood, and some prefer art that involves the viewer in the creation itself. I don

          • Re:Holy Shit (Score:3, Insightful)

            by marcello_dl ( 667940 )
            The distinction between "art" and "the latest way to use technology to impress people" is the problem. I dont really imply art cant be made that way, just as a circus number can indeed be art. But the problem is that most circus numbers are not art, it is a discovery to the extreme of human and animal capabilities.
        • The other problem is that I and possibly other people prefer hard-wired art, you know, the good ol' idea of art provoking emotions, not responding to them.

          How best to provoke emotions is dependent on the mood of the viewer. If you are stressed and angry, and the artwork wants to make you happy, it needs to calm you down before showing funny clown pictures. Old-fashioned art doesn't have the option of changing how it tries to provoke emotions based on your mood.

          Hell, this form of interactive mood manipula

  • Measure and control (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Is anyone else concerned that we're building ourselves into badly tuned measure and control feedback loops? Hardware that reacts to its owner's feelings will influence the emotional state based on that same state for input. Oscillation might become a problem. Alternatively we could lock ourselves into one state through reinforcement from our reactive art.

    • Is anyone else concerned that we're building ourselves into badly tuned measure and control feedback loops? Hardware that reacts to its owner's feelings will influence the emotional state based on that same state for input. Oscillation might become a problem. Alternatively we could lock ourselves into one state through reinforcement from our reactive art.

      That's not a problem since, unless you are a sociopath, you would like to be happy. So improve the mood of unhappy people, and reinforce the happiness of t

    • Re:Measure and control (Score:2, Interesting)

      by kfg ( 145172 ) *
      Is anyone else concerned that we're building ourselves into badly tuned measure and control feedback loops?

      Just wait until you start having a dysfunctional relationship with your "empathic" AI house.

      I'll be keeping my manual controls, thank you very much.

      KFG
    • ... In Soviet Russia, art critiques you!
    • Oscillation might become a problem

      Indeed. Half of the world's population already experiences monthly oscillations. And the other half is painfully aware of this problem.

      It is perhaps the oldest problem that has plagued humanity.

  • Well? (Score:2, Funny)

    by curebox ( 985425 )
    From TFA:

    "It does all of this in real time, meaning that as the viewer's emotions change the artwork responds accordingly," he added in a statement.

    In related news, Hentai stocks rose sharply.

  • Old News (Score:2, Interesting)

    by cswinter ( 860605 )
    The idea for this is hardly new, I am pretty sure this was in a late 90's film called Antitrust with Ryan Phillippe. The Bill Gates stylee character had such a system in his house, I think it showed Heironymous Bosch paintings whenever he entered the room.
    • That's even the moment Gary Winston (the Bill Gates stylee character), while talking about that, says that his system is more sophisticated than Bill Gates' one, making the distinction between his character and the one he's copying.

      By the way, it's not late 90's, but early 21th century, as the film has been released in 2001 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/ [imdb.com].

      Once again, Science Fiction becoming reality :)

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday August 05, 2006 @06:07AM (#15851538)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • my first thought: (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 05, 2006 @06:30AM (#15851560)
    wtf is EA going to do?
  • no doubt research making it will advance the topic of pattern recognition and machine-reading human facial expressions, but how does that qualify as an art form?

    I thought art was about (human) creativity, about delivering a message via the selected method of expression; what i see in the TFA looks more like someone's first gimp exercise. Let's keep "art" out of it until the painting can understand the viewer and re-draws itself, or until the artist can decide how the painting reacts to emotions (and then wa
    • If every piece about which someone once said "that's not art" were removed from the art museums of the world, it would leave acres of empty walls. Pop art, environmental art, de Stijl, Expressionist, Fauve, Impressionist, Surreal, Dada, Cubist... were all dismissed as "not art". And many of the great classic works were done in styles or with techniques that were - at first - dismissed as "bad art". I don't go quite so far as the folks who claim that anything the artist declares to be art is art, but the
      • For the record, dada should be removed from that list as it was decidednly anti-art. The creators didn't want to fit into the art world, and thefolks who aped them and added their pretensions etc. missed the point, really.

    • Looking ahead, I think this kind of technology would have more interesting applications in robotics.

      As for whether or not it's art, there is some truth to the claim that art is in the eye of the beholder.

  • Great (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Spacejock ( 727523 ) on Saturday August 05, 2006 @06:35AM (#15851567)
    So when I'm down and want cheering up, they show me depressing pictures. Fantastic.
    • You assume they would do that. They can obviously change the responses if they wish too.
    • They should likely include, in the capabilities of the sytem, the ability to moderate moods.
      eg. Sad -> Cheer you up
      Anxious -> Calm you down etc..

      I suppose you could find enormous uses for this in places like waiting rooms where everyone is just a little antsy. Just make sure that they have an adult lock on it -- wouldn't it be horrible to feel eerrr.. Frisky and have it show you something to moderate that mood? More likely then not, as proposed above, it would show you something you can "unsee" --

  • When a retro-sucks gamer looks at it (Score:3, Funny)

    by noidentity ( 188756 ) on Saturday August 05, 2006 @06:41AM (#15851576)
    When this next-gen gamer [slashdot.org] looks at it, it immediately changes to a 3D-rendered image with all the latest effects.
  • The /. editor must have deliberately written the title to make us believe that this is a story about how EA is going to start listen to their audience and make good games again. Well this "viewer" is disappointed.
  • And Code is not "Poetry," in case that needed any clarification.

    Happy to help...
  • Mood rings, only this time electronic and hanging on the wall! Dude, pass that pipe over her.

  • Goth Art? (Score:2, Funny)

    by DSW-128 ( 959567 )
    Until some goth walks up to it, and it just goes completely blank. (or explodes)
  • so now us geeks can take a date to the exhibit, demonstrate how "enlightened" we are, and also determine if she's up for some hot lovin'?
  • This is art as yes-man. Art that modifies itself to agree with your displayed mood might seem pleasing, but what if you want to step outside of yourself? The greatest art that there is doesn't just regurgitate and reflect back at you what you feel, but it also takes you outside of your own perspective, changes your worldview, and might make you a new and better person. What about art that confronts us, challenges us, and forces us to consider new ideas?

    • All of that would certainly be possible here as well. Change to *suit* the viewer, perhaps not, but probably better if it would react in certain ways to the viewer's emotions, taking the viewer's emotions elsewhere, which in turn would cause it to change again to take the user's emotions somewhere else, in what essentially amounts to a feedback loop. But then again, I believe that genre of art already exists. It's called a video game, although most people engaged in that art form don't think quite in those

  • This is very useful for people who show their emotions as clearly as Marcel Marceau (that white-face French mime guy). As for the rest of us, how often does someone who is feeling down pull an extreme grimace like the one shown in the article? Basically, never - except perhaps when in combat, or on seeing a film as bad as "Vera Drake"... but suffice to say, at such moments of crisis we're unlikely to want to look at any paintings, let alone paintings that are liable to change make us angrier. Most people in
  • How often do you go look at artwork you may have on the walls of your home with a big, goofy grin on your face? Or stand in front of a painting while crying? I tend to have an esentially neutral expression on my face 90% of the time, and probably 99% of the time while looking at art in a museum. My eyes may widen in appreciation of truly masterful art, but I don't beam at the painting.
  • Does this really have to be more difficult than just reading the diameter of the pupil of the eye? The more fascinated we are, the larger it is. You could just work through different secanarios to find the one with the most positive reaction. Even Larry Niven used this as an aspect of one of his early novels, although in that case the effect was enforced by another person with "Plateau Eyes".
  • Whenever someone's face is recognized as being on a terrorist watch list it will show a picture of the twin towers being hit with a big red circle around them and a slash through the center! Much better than those shoe searches.

    Since happy people are more likely to buy stuff, I this could be used for sales? Get people to volunteer to watch TV with one of these monitors. The networks want information on viewer reaction for the purpose of ad placement. The trick is to avoid feedback loops by having one audien
  • While their current version says it shows somber imagery during a scowl and brighter imagery during a smile, there's of course no reason that can't be completely different. Further, the ability for something to change based on viewer-mood-recognition could in theory even enhance the thought-provoking nature of a piece of art. So it is not anti-art or anything by definition and the technology has some potential.
  • couldn't the same thing be done with mood ring technology?

    :wq
  • I liked how the 'mood' of the faces were measured in two categories, pleasure and arousal wonder how it would respond to an O face
  • Could this(maybe not in this current incarnation, but the basic concept) exacerbate the existing mood? Like if I'm sad, and the painting becomes more dreary. So I get more melancholy, and the painting becomes progressively more depressing, until I am completely despondent. Or conversely, reinforce happiness to the point of mania? I suppose that might be in the 'preferences' dialog, do you want your mood reversed, or would you like it reinforced.
  • i wonder what happens if you have a screwed up face, or you're retarded will you just get extremely funny gameplay or lame gameplay?

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