Mood Ring(tones?)
by Imran Ali
In October 2002, during a visit to MIT’s Media Lab, I had the pleasure of playing with student Joan Morris DiMicco’s Conductive Chat demo.
Using a device called the Galvactivator (designed by another student), an IM user’s emotional state is measured - based on their skin conductivity. This reading, in turn alters the size and colour of text in a chat application - in real time.
Just over five years later, Antonio Arico’s concept design, Moody Sensiblog, seeks to use similar methods to create a stream of mood data - as Yanko Design points out - ‘It’s Like Biological Twitter’.
Both projects, along with my own thoughts on haptic messaging and haptic phones, hint at possible futures in mobile sensing and messaging. The iPhone has already brought us intuitive touch-based interfaces, yet as sensing technologies improve and find there way into mobile handsets, I wonder what kinds of meaning and emotion we’ll be able to convey - intuitively - in the messaging applications that will supersede concepts such as Conductive Chat and Moody Sensiblog.
