Angelica Lim over at IEEE Spectrum has posted about these funny looking glasses that could help with “emotional labor”. From the story:
Have you ever had trouble concentrating in the office as people walk by and glance at you? Do you come off as unfriendly or aloof, when you’re really just focusing on your work?
Dr. Hirotaka Osawa from Tsukuba University, in Japan, has developed a new wearable device to help us with something called “emotional labor.” His idea is that people could adopt cyborg technology to increase the emotional comfort of those around us. In this case, the device is a crazy pair of glasses that display eyeballs on their lenses.
The device’s virtual eyes naturally follow people and movement, making it appear as though you’re friendly and approachable, even if you’re too busy doing something else or too tired to actually look friendly and approachable.
“This emotional support reduces a user’s cognitive load for social manners,” Osawa says.
Check out his whimsical video below, which won the Best Video award at the 2014 ACM/IEEE Human-Robot Interaction Conference last month:
The device, which Osawa calls AgencyGlass, has several different functions: when you tilt your head back, the animated eyes look upwards to make it look like you’re thinking. If you nod or shake your head, the glasses blink. All of this is performed with a gyroscope and accelerometer to detect head movement, and an external camera to detect faces and motion.
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