Cheese Cam: Unconscious interaction between humans and a digital camera

Abstract

In everyday life, humans interact with many products. In many of these interactions, a person performs an action with, toward, or in the vicinity of a product and then the product reacts to that action. In this paper, however, the opposite interaction pattern, where a product performs an action to induce a user reaction, is presented by a new camera, 'Cheese Cam', concept. Cheese Cam is a camera that can induce unconscious facial reactions in a photography subject, based on mirror neuron theory and facial mimicry theories. A small facial expression icon displayed on Cheese Cam's screen induces unconscious facial reactions in the subject. Experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of Cheese Cam on the facial reactions of subjects, and the results are discussed in this paper. Through this study, we explored possibilities of unconscious interaction.