Happy No Grumpy

Happy No Grumpy from Chloe Chia on Vimeo.

As a favor for a friend obsessed with Grumpy Cat, I decided I would bring the meme to life by having him appear and judge the participant whenever a ‘smile’ was detected. After all, I’ve always been curious about the cutesy ‘smile detection technologies’ that some consumer cameras have, where the picture is only taken when all the faces detected in it are smiling. In my project, a ‘smile’ was determined by a rather crude set of ratios between the heights and width of the mouth in proportion to other properties on the face. Other data points used from the OSC included positioning and size, which helped determine the nature of the ‘neutral’ character, as well as the positioning of Grumpy Cat’s eyes, which in person, makes it seem as though he is looking at you regardless of how you are positioned towards the computer.

If it weren’t for time constraints I think I would’ve loved to pursue this further, smoothen the performance of the smile detection, and perhaps making use of OSC’s 3D capabilities to make for more a more natural neutral character, as well as the shifting of Grumpy Cat so that his judgement may rain ever more accurately.