Space of Faces

Interactive Telecommunications Program, NYU 1999

Project Description: This is a conceptual space of all possible faces.  As the user contorts a cartoon face, they navigate through the space.  Related faces are displayed next to the user’s face.  The user can quickly navigate towards another person’s face by clicking on, and thus stealing their feature.  This is an interface experiment trying to improve on the travel metaphor used in most spatial interfaces, for instance. 2D Macintosh Desktop, or 3D virtual environments.  These break down with the scale and interactivity of the Internet where more people are able to contribute as opposed to merely view material.  In traditional interfaces, people place themselves in one spot along the dimensions of x, y, and z.  They will be related to their neighbors only along those 2 or 3 dimensions or along some category mapped to those dimensions.  Searching for other people becomes as tedious as traveling on foot through an enormous and growing city.   Internet search engines avoid this problem by allowing documents to be related by as many dimensions as there are words in the document but they abandon the spatial interface altogether and look more like the old DOS Interface.  Space of Faces tried to take the best from these two interface techniques.

Technical Notes: I wrote the web client as a Java applet and the server as a Java application connected using JDBC to a MS-SQL database.