Study 4! For this one, I worked with Isobel Pattinson and Brooke McKay on creating a patch to embarrass people. To do this we gave them the task of jumping around and waving their arms, with the goal of filling up a lolly jar. While they were doing this, our patch was secretly recording them and would play the recording back (for everyone to see) when they managed to fill the lolly jar.

The patch did not embarrass people as much as we had originally hoped, however, we can probably attribute this to the context the patch is exhibited in. When we presented it to the class, the person using it was being watched, so they weren’t as liberal with their movements. I’d imagine if we set this up in a space where the user could not be easily seen when jumping around it would be more embarrassing for them, as they would not be expecting to be seen. There is also the fact that after our first trial, any volunteers knew what to expect, and wouldn’t be embarrassed as they were expecting to be seen

We faced a few issues in trying to get this patch working, our motion detection system took a little bit of time to figure out, but I am happy with how it came out, as it requires motion in all areas of the frame, instead of just a small area (meaning people have to move more). Surprisingly, it took a while to figure out how to overlay a .png file onto a video, eventually, we discovered the jit.alphablend object which solved all the problems we were having.

It seems that there has to be something unexpected for someone to experience embarrassment. I would say we fulfilled this with the programming end of it, however, it seems that the setting it is presented in / how it is presented plays a very significant part in the amount of embarrassment.

Download the Max Patch here.