Face interface!?

A short story about a project I did a few weeks ago with my co-student: Mohamad Al Ghorani. (15 min read)

Author: Wouter van der Heijde - June 2020

Dramatic music starts playing I remember this week so well, it was the last week before COVID-19 shook down our existence and life as we known it. It was raining all week but it never stopped me from reaching the public library of Amsterdam. To work on an interactive project to search books in their data-set. Our prototype was designed to help children make a selection of topics based on their smile. While the week was really intense we really had so much fun working on this project.

Concept

So the idea about this project was about helping children to find a book by topic they would like so they can write a essay about it. But how do you know when a kid likes a topic? "Ah, how a bout a smile? If I like something I see, I usually start smiling!" So this could be a perfect way to find a topic that fits the children that don't know where to write about. And the concept was born: Choosing topics based on a smile, and present a list of books that match with that topic. So we would present images to the children about: Animals, Sports, History etc. And then when a user smiles the pick that topic and maybe even a sub-topic after that with eventually a list of books.

Tech

We discovered an opensource face recognition package that could be installed on a local server (no internet required). So we build ourselves a node.js server and set up the package to work with the our laptops camera.