Response:
It is said that facial expression play a role in our mood. Forcing a smile is believed to actually improve one’s mood. I was very interested by the parallel between facial expression and games in their effect on our moods. I chose to explore this by creating a simplified Super Mario game that can be controlled with facial expressions. I trained the Teachable Machine to recognize smiling and a neutral facial expression. I did so in three different and distinct times of the day, location, and with different appearances. I had planned to include a frowning class as well but the machine struggled with differentiating it with the neutral class.
Using techniques we learned about in previous classes, I used an image of the character Mario in the sketch in order to better emulate the game. When the user smiles, Mario flies higher, avoiding the obstacles. Each obstacle that gets successfully avoided increases the player’s score by 1.
When the user stops smiling, Mario descends downwards. If Mario bumps into an obstacle, the game ends and a message that says “Game Over” appears.
