This ‘True Love’ Tinder Robot Can Read Your Emotions
As the tech world continues to astound, whether it be with self-driving cars or wearable technology, many in the dating industry are wondering what the future of online dating might look like.
A few months ago, eHarmony and Imperial College London predicted that wearable tech, DNA and virtual reality would likely be important issues in the industry over the next 25 years, as sites look for new ways to create better matches and interpret our human reactions.
And a new art project imagines just that – a time when computers can read our emotions and feed it into software to help us find love.
The “True Love Tinder Robot” is an animatronic machine that swipes left or right to singles on Tinder by reading your body’s reaction to different profiles.
Users of the device simply put their phone in the dock and place their hands on the sensors in front of the robot hand.
The robot then reads your “true heart’s desire” through its sensors, which reads the “change in your galvanic skin response”, which is how sweaty your palms get.
The idea was created by Nicole He, a graduate student from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.
Speaking about the project, He said: “In a time when it’s very normal for couples to meet online, we trust that algorithms on dating sites can find us suitable 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.”
To make the robot, the graduate student used 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.”
If you want to try the robot, He will be previewing it at the ITP Winter Show on December 20 – 21st.
Find out more here.