Responsive Portraits

Flavia Sparacino, Nuria Oliver, Alex Pentland and Glorianna Davenport, MIT Media Lab

Presented at ISEA97, Chicago, September 1997.

Overview

We created Responsive Portraits as an early experiment in interactive portraiture. Instead of showing one fixed photograph, the portrait changed as a visitor moved, looked, or made facial expressions.

Our system used real-time computer vision to estimate the viewer's distance, head movement, point of view, and expression. Those signals selected different portrait poses and responses, making the image feel more like an encounter than a static display.

We also considered using face recognition to let a portrait retain a history of earlier encounters and adjust its response to a returning visitor.

Publications

@inproceedings{sparacino1997responsive,
  author = {Sparacino, Flavia and Oliver, Nuria and Pentland, Alex and Davenport, Glorianna},
  title = {Responsive portraits},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA'97)},
  year = 1997,
  url = {https://www.nuriaoliver.com/respportrait/paper.html},
  cites = 9
}