Mood ball

Context

Human emotions ebb and flow, morph. One mood transforms into another. Visual and audio stimuli can augment and influence one’s mood. Sometimes we "don’t go there" because it is distasteful or unpleasant. Other times we avoid the unknown because of laziness or fear.

Humans speak of subjects with words. Words have unclear meanings. I used to play around with "similes" in Word on my old Mac. Did you know that it is possible to start with "good" and end up with "bad"? It takes a bit of work but it is possible to jump from one meaning to the next until the original meaning has been subverted. The same is true of emotions or moods. They are fuzzy around the edges too.

Problem

There was no perceived problem here. This idea is just a cool thing to do. Maybe the problem could be stated as: “How to create an immersive environment which could be used to augment and/or alter the mood of people in that that environment.” It could also be "How to create an environment where the sum total of human experience can be absorbed by osmosis?" Big problems.

Solution

The solution is to relate human moods/emotions in a 3D space by mapping the relationships onto a sphere. There are no dead ends, no backwaters, no need to retrace your steps. Wherever you are new emotions and moods abound. No mood is taboo or edited out: Love, Fear, Sex, Death, Violence, Peace, Jealousy etc.

It should be possible to easily navigate from one mood to another. Each mood should have traces or suggestions of other, possibly distantly related, moods.
Each of these moods can then be mapped to multi media resources: images, words, text, and sounds. Those experiencing the system are bombarded by a variety of influences which cannot be comprehended in one go. It just washes over the user and they must give in to the tide of symbols. Hopefully this will evoke a mood change.

It is unclear who controls the navigation: A MoodJockey or the user themselves.

Inspiration

I once saw a TV show on the intersection of art and science. The discussion was about "truncated icosahedrons". Try putting that into Google. If I remember correctly, and I probably don’t, the configuration was helpful for describing the shape of a molecule. The scientist had seen the shape in art and was able to apply it to the scientific work they were doing. The properties of the configuration were also helpful to me – allowing me to map a "plane" of nodes and arcs onto a sphere.

http://www.mpi-stuttgart.mpg.de/andersen/fullerene/vatican.html

Implementation

Imagine a soccer ball. Each pentagon or hexagon was divided into trianges by bisecting each vertex with a line that joins with the centre. Each node represented an emotion and each emotion was related to its neighbours. Users could navigate from one node to another along the splines. Love was on the top, fear on the bottom. It was just a matter of placing emotions around the ball in a way that seemed to make sense. This could have been done more scientifically (using psychological data of some kind) but my friend Arthur and I managed to get them all on somehow.

I got the mood schema into a database and could query out the nodes OK. This wasn’t too hard. The main problem for me at the time was the inability to display the media in a way that was sexy enough to achieve my “immersive environment” goals. The problem with this set up was that I was stuck with using DHTML and JavaScript for the implementation and it was quite tricky to do. I only got so far with the project. Far enough to be come frustrated with the development environment.

Strengths and Weaknesses

I think that the idea is strong because it is the nexus of a number of areas. DJs are now treated as goods because they can use their expertise to combine sounds. Video artists may well achieve a similar status one day. The mood ball provides an easy, intuitive and customisable way to display visual content.

Business Model

It is difficult to see where money could be made from this. It might be possible to sell it as a solution out of the box with a growing database of moods but I doubt that people would pay for it. It would be a labour of love – giving something to humanity.

Outcome

The conceptual problems were solved but the implementation in the browser let me down. I still think that this is a nifty idea and it could well work using a different client.

Tags
idea
mood