Responsive Portraits

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

Presented at ISEA97, Chicago, September 1997.

Overview

Responsive Portraits was an early interactive portrait project from the MIT Media Lab. Instead of showing one fixed photograph, the portrait changed as a visitor moved, looked, or made facial expressions.

The 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.

Face recognition could also let a portrait retain a history of earlier encounters and adjust its response to a returning visitor. The archived description presents this as an expressive interaction design; it does not report a user study or recognition-accuracy results.

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
}