Nicole He
Literally put your love life in a robot's hands.
http://nicole.pizza/itp/tag/tinder-robot/
Description
The True Love Tinder Robot will find you love, guaranteed. With Tinder open, you put your phone down front of the robot hand. Then you place your own human hands on the sensors. As you are looking at each Tinder profile, the robot will read your true heart's desire through the sensors and decide whether or not you are a good match with that person based on how your body reacts. If it determines that you're attracted to that person, it will swipe right. If not, it will swipe left. Throughout the process, it will make commentary on your involuntary decisions.
In a time when it's very normal for couples to meet online, we trust algorithms on dating sites to find us potential partners. Simultaneously, we use consumer biometric devices to tell us what's going on with our bodies and what we should do to be healthy and happy. Maybe it's not a stretch to consider what happens when we combine these things.
This project explores the idea that the computer knows us better than we know ourselves, and therefore it has better authority on who we should date than we do. In a direct way, the True Love Tinder Robot makes the user confront what it feels like to let computers make intimate decisions for us.
The robot is built with an Arduino, servos, a text-to-speech module, LEDS, a couple sheets of metal acting as galvanic skin response sensor, a bunch of wires, a box, and a speaker. The code is available on Github. You can also find my in-progress documentation on my ITP blog.
This is my final project for my Intro to Computational Media and Intro to Physical Computing classes during fall of 2015 at NYU ITP. Special thanks to my teachers, Tom Igoe and Lauren McCarthy.
Classes
Introduction to Computational Media, Introduction to Physical Computing