Choose Your Own FER is an interactive choose-your-own-adventure story that imagines a world shaped by
Facial Emotion Recognition (FER). You navigate the narration paths by displaying different facial
expressions, directly engaging with the technology as you learn about its potential implications.
about us
We are Sara and Natalia, an interaction designer and a deep learning engineer by
day, friends and artists by night.
This project started from Sara's interest in exploring interactions with technology that
go beyond touchscreens and finger tapping. The face, with all its expressiveness,
was a great example of such an alternative interaction possibility. Yet, during
conversations with Natalia about the underlying Facial Emotion Recognition (FER)
technology, we discovered not only creative possibilities but also troubling nuances
such as biases, assumptions, and ethical dilemmas that are often invisible to the
public.
With the idea of exposing the hidden layer of FER through an interactive story, we
applied to the Content Vienna competition 2025 by Wirtschaftsagentur Wien, where
we were awarded the Digital Literacy Prize. This enabled us to start with the
development of the project.
Sara was responsible for interaction and visual design, as well as writing the
interactive story, while Natalia implemented the FER model and developed the
website.
In the world of accelerating technology, we wanted to explore the case of non-regulatory usage of
AI-based systems.
This facial emotion recognition experience uses basic Deep Learning models, whose tasks are twofold:
face detection and emotion recognition.
By using the video stream from your smartphone camera or webcam, we extract a 'snapshot' every 500 ms,
which is then sent to our backend API and analysed by several neural networks.
One of four expressions can be recognised: happiness, sadness, anger, and surprise.
The recognized emotion then determines which branch of the story you follow next.
We do understand all the responsibilities of processing personal data and appreciate your trust and
curiosity for this project.
We strictly operate and follow withing alowed borders of EU Data Act and
GDPR regulation. This means that during your experience,
none of your biometric data,
or any other form of your personal data is stored on our backend.
Additionally, in accordance EU AI Act
none of the statistics and metrics are collected during the provided experience. On the contrary, our
goal was to show the world
where such regulation would not exist.
The codebase of this project is based on open-source projects licensed under MIT and Apache-2.0
licenses and corresponding datasets used in these projects.
In this world, Facial Emotion Recognition tracks your expressions. Based on these expressions,
the story will diverge, and you will discover one specific world and how FER affected the three
different protagonists within it. If you have a genuine emotion to what you read, show that
expression. If you don't, choose the one that is closest to what you would feel if you were the
character and act it out.
If we recognise your emotional expression before you finish reading, you can always go back. If
you wish to choose a different path, you can also go back. However, you can only go back one
step.
We don't store your data, but process your emotional expressions in real time. We recognise four
emotions. Try them out below.
Throughout the story, there are a few paths where you will be required to interact in a special
way. You will see the instructions for those interactions written in pink at the points where
you'll need them.
When you are ready to start the story, click on the button to enter the future.
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