Projects

Since 2015, we have been arranging Emotion Hack Day. The purpose of the hackathon is to uncover new ways of measuring and conveying emotions. Many wonderful individuals have taken part in Emotion Hack Day, coming up with creative solutions to deepen emotional communication and understanding in digital interaction.

In 2018, we brought our Emotion Hack Day -hackathon to the LIFT conference arranged by Yle. The hackathon focused on the emotion of joy and sought for new ways of using technology in uncovering, experiencing and perceptualizing joy. The winner of the hackathon cleverly created Rönkäpp - an application specifically designed to evoke joy in the most known news anchor in Finland, Matti Rönkä, who also served as a judge for the hackathon.

In addition to comments from the beloved anchor, we measured the activation of Matti's smile muscles during presentations from the hackathon teams, to obtain an objective measure of joy. You can watch a video of the event on Yle Areena.

In 2016, we collaborated with the amazing artists and engineers of the Olento Collective to create an interactive installation at the Sideways music festival in Helsinki. The installation was set up in a container on the festival grounds. Cameras were placed to view the front rows of audiences at two stages. An algorithm converted the average emotions experienced by the audiences into a digital sculpture that changed shape, texture, color and movement according to the audiences’ emotions.

In 2016, we created a program for real-time measurement and visualization of a soccer-player’s brain activity during a derby. The work was commissioned by Elisa from Wörks, a Helsinki-based digital agency. The project entailed exciting phases of technological development that can be reviewed in the documentary created of the project.

Sponsored by Microsoft, we created a game for intentionally synchronizing biosignals for the technology conference Slush in 2016. In the installation, the participants were sat in rocking chairs equipped with measuring EEG, ECG and EDA, and they were tasked with finding out ways to synchronize their body states. Read more about it here.

Sónar is a multiple-day festival focusing on music, creativity and technology, organized since 1994 The music program of the festival also contains a three-day congress, Sónar+D dedicated to Creativity, Technology and Business.

In 2017, we participated in Sónar+D, sponsored by the Finnish music organization Teosto, to participate in a hackathon with a team of brilliant hand-picked experts. Together we created an installation combining biosignal measurements and music, called Bananas for Sonar.

At Sónar, we discovered that bananas naturally conduct electricity from the human skin. This discovery inspired the installation, in which two participants sat in chairs with armrests equipped with real bananas and listened to the same music. The bananas were connected to biosensors and used for measuring the heart rate and skin conductance of participants. The biosignals were visualized on a screen to show how in sync the individuals were while listening to music.