Hackalight

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  Our Overworked Team Members

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  Team pic with Logitech!

Inspiration

We were inspired by the effect that colours could have on mood and performance of a person. Research in psychology indicates differentiated reactions to blue versus red coloured environments (http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2007-01821-008) so our goal was to play with this concept.

What it does

The colour of the Keyboard reacts to the facial emotion of the person sitting in front of the computer giving him the feeling that the the device is empathic with the user's emotions.

How we built it

A java applet takes care of controlling all the logitech devices through the provided interface and querying Microsoft Azure's Emotion service in order to detect the probability of 8 basic emotions in the user's face. Based on these emotions, we compute the displayed colours.

Challenges we ran into

• Coping with the Windows-only interface with the logitech accessories.
• Managing simultaneous tasks

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Doing a fun hack with some cool Logitech hardware.
• Using a cognitive api to influence the user

What we learned

• Hacking hardware
• Using Azure

What's next for Hackalight

• Improving analysis of emotions based on existing datasets.
• Using other cognitive inputs to enhance emotion tracking.
• Adding parallel activities

Challenges

• Microsoft Azure services
• Logitech

Github

• Last commit: 1d5a2bd

Built With

• azure
• emotion-api
• headphones
• java
• keyboard
• logitech
• mouse