Final Project - Research...

The human face is one of the most important tools that we use for interaction and communication. Changes in the appearance of one person’s face produce an effect in another person, which creates nonverbal communication between the two.
Another type of communication use text messages on different online networks, chats or mobile phones. That type of interaction seems to be very dominant and even more accessible, in a way, for very wide population that has a typical west modern way of life. As it appears, the usage of text messages for communication between people is very successful. However, more and more usage of facial expressions icons added to the “online/text language”. The first incarnation of our facial emotional reaction appeared as ASCII signs like: “:)”, “:(”, “;)” and etc. As the time goes on, the icons become more and more realistic: the “emoticons”. Xin Lia, Chieh-Chih Chang, and Shi-Kuo Chang Computer scientists at the University of Pittsburgh took it even further while developed software that takes the actual picture of a person’s face and creates more “emoticons” from it.
A fascinating process happens, the technology goes back and forward simultaneously, in one hand it develops more and more ways for artificial communication but in the same time, by increasing the technological skills, it goes back to the most reflective and primitive, and apparently the most effective way of communication; nonverbal communication via our facial expressions.
But this process is not the only interesting thing that happens; there is a remarkable influence of the online communication on our basic, face-to-face communication.
There is something about those “smiley faces” icons that sometimes works even better for certain situations. Maybe it is the generalization of the faces that creates more “safe” reaction, not committing, like a politically correct mask. The simplicity of the abstraction – maybe sometimes we just don’t need so many facial details for an interaction. More and more I find myself in need just to type that simple smiley face on my face, sometimes it seems the most appropriate reaction.

For my Interface final project I would like to explore that mutual connection between online and face-to-face communications, in a relation to the basics face emotional expressions.