Vibey
Vibey is a speculative design project that explores the idea of "stickiness" in the context of data exchanges; in this project we designed a new form of social media that facilitates communication of emotions between people in close proximity. Vibey is a cellphone app that transmits emotions, which are then received and heard through an auditory implant. This project asks, how will new forms of social media change how we exhibit and interpret emotions?
Scenario: What would the user experience be if Vibey is used at a large event, such as a sports game, where hundreds of people are broadcasting their emotions? Information overload would detract from the immediate experience of the game, and the broadcasted emotions would become a clutter of noise. Users would need to develop a form of psychological filtering, in order to focus on a single user's emotion, of the cause of the emotions.
One possibility for psychological filtering is through the cocktail party effect, which enables people to focus their attention on a specific sound source while blocking out extra information. This is done through a combination of binaural sound processing, visual correlation with a sound source, and detection of information that is deemed important.