Lie detector for Love
The True Love Tinder Robot uses a holder for a smartphone running Tinder, a sensor pad which reads its user's physiological reactions, and a robotic hand which swipes left (reject) or right (accept).
Creator Nicole He built the robot as part of a two-year graduate program that explores "the imaginative use of communications technologies - how they might augment, improve, and bring delight and art into people's live."
In a post on her website, Ms He said the robot explored the idea that computers know us better than we know ourselves.
"In a time when it's very normal for couples to meet online, we trust that algorithms on dating sites can find us suitable partners," Ms He said.
"Simultaneously, we use consumer biometric devices to tell us what's going on with our bodies, and what we should do to be healthy and happy.
"Maybe it's not a stretch to consider what happens when we combine these things."
The robot's sensors read the galvanic skin response, or how electrically conductive the user's skin is.
Or, as Ms He puts it, how sweaty your palms get.
The same technology is used in polygraph machines — more commonly known as lie detectors — and in psychological research.
In a Q&A on her website, Ms He said the technology was "Definitely, absolutely, 100 per cent no doubt" scientific.
Ms He, who does not use Tinder herself, said the idea came to her while she was sleeping.
She has put her references, designs, and software code online.
The robot was built with common electronics parts, a metal plate and a wooden box, but building the hand was "surprisingly annoying."
Smartphones detect contact on the screen using electrical sensors that read interruptions to an electrostatic field, so a smartphone stylus - or Ms He's robot hand - has to be built to interrupt the field in the same way that skin would.
"I cut a hole in the thumb," Ms He said, "shoved a piece of metal through, covered the metal thing with a piece of rubber, and connected the metal to ground."
Ms He did not specify where she procured the hand, which bears an eerie resemblance to 'Thing' from the Addams Family.
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