Faces You Don’t Want to See During UX Research – Especially For VR

Faces of discomfort often followed headset adjustment – or predicted upcoming adjustments. Bored faces and faces on the contempt spectrum tended to be predictive of undesirable experiences later disclosed during the post-demo interviews. These expressions were not just useful for predicting events. They also served as points for further investigation.

Faking Aging in Characters

If you are aging a face, pay attention to where you add sagging, deep lines, and folds. There are patterns to follow. While everyone’s pattern is different, general principles still exist. Aging reflects many things – our unique anatomy, our repeated expression use, our past injuries, etc. It is a map of our history.

Killer Smiles: A Fine Line Between Creepy and Beautiful

From observing trends in art, social media, ranking systems, and pop culture, there appear to be two main types of “creepy smiles”: Type I, which I coined The Grinch Pinch and Type 2, which I coined The Muted Shark. Types I and II typically contain all or many of the following features:

Bias In Emotion Tracking

We seem to subscribe to the popular oversimplification that machines are less biased than humans; however, if you are familiar with the ways in which machines are trained to read and focus on different aspects of data, you will know: It’s just not that simple.

Comparative Anatomy (Sneak Preview)

Currently learning chimpanzee FACS, chimpanzee anatomy, and making custom chimpanzee landmark diagrams. (Chimpanzee landmarks determined by Animal FACS group. Original research work by Lisa A Parr, Bridget M Waller, and Jennifer Fugate. See: Emotional communication in primates: implications for neurobiology )

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