I can calculate people’s heart rate from someone’s finger over the phone’s rear camera with flash turned on. So can I make a program for people to send, receive, and exchange heart beats.
There’s at least plenty of wordplay to twist around with this —> “Holding your heart in the palm of my hand,” Vulnerability, dark humor (Golan imagined someone on their death bed, I can also see it as something you use while having “heart to heart”, or an alternative to holding hands for the remote couple?), and then I wonder…would it be strangely intimate to hold a stranger’s heart?
Kyle Machulis’s shared the thumb kiss app, and it was delightfully simple and elegant. If I could get some of that Taptic Engine action here with the above heart program that’d be fun on the technical side too.
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WIP demos
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Heart monitor from camera feed from Marisa Lu on Vimeo.
Started setting this up as a native app talking to a node.js server.
I occasionally gave my work in progress apps to unsuspecting classmates to see if they could figure out either the intent of the app or how to use it. Most of the compositional UI changes grew organically from that as opposed to well defined and designed spec sheet because I was wary of what I’d be able to achieve my first time in swift.
One of the bigger UX changes came with a larger compromise in battery level, but haha, I think it’s worth it — when your finger is on the camera, the system automatically knows and begins to read heart beat with the flashlight automatically toggled on.
Finger on and off from Marisa Lu on Vimeo.