Mirror Self
Self-analysis Experience | Interactive Narrative | Group Project (2 members) | 2023
This experience invites you to step up to a mirror and uncover a passage to a self-talk. Begin by facing our interactive mirror and answer questions that explore your real and metaphorical selves. Then, engage in a unique dialogue with your 'Mirror-self', an AI-powered counterpart behind the glass. We built a web application that create people's custom Mirror-self AI, to talk to them.
TThis project collaborates with Vio Zhu.
Demo
Experience Test Record: People of Different Ages
Interaction Flow
Technical Implementation:
There are 2 major parts: a web application that handles communication experience and a mirror tunnel physical installation that creates a visual experience.
The web application with node.js contains the following parts:
1. user interface that handles:
- storyline progressing
- user communication with gpt by speaking
- visual effects
- arduino communication
2. node.js server that handles:
- process user answers into a GPT system configuration template
- communication with GPT API and other services;then process returned response into user facing speach.
Physical installation is fabricated with wood, acrylic and LED stripe. We developed Arduino program that handles the lighting change of the installation in different storyline parts.
Installation & Setting Sketch
Mirror Status
Fabrication & Physical Computing
The process is divided into two parts: the first half involves collecting user information about their “other self” through questions, and the second half involves dialogue with the “other self” (GPT).
There are two main improvements:
1. Making responses more colloquial. Despite efforts to encourage a casual tone in prompts, responses were often too formal. To address this, prompts now start with informal language and have a word limit, resulting in more natural, colloquial outputs.
2. Integrating an Observe, Reflect, Analyze sequence into responses. This approach, inspired by a research paper, makes GPT's outputs more predictable and ensures it considers real-time user inputs, even with a long prompt template.
To enhance the immersive nature of the entire conversational experience and complement it with a visual experience, we have created a box apparatus. In the scene, participants can only see a mirror and not the box itself. Through the switching of LED lights, this mirror will turn into a transparent glass during the conversation phase. Through the glass and the black passage inside, participants will see “another self” opposite them, a dynamic portrait captured and reprocessed by a webcam as the participant answers questions.
Glass Passage Status
NEXT STEP
Game Development-RISING RIVER
Building on our foundation, we are now developing this project into an AI-powered Narrative Therapy Game in collaboration with psychologists and drama therapy experts.
Drawing on Jungian shadow theory and therapeutic journaling techniques, we have crafted a game experience designed to facilitate self-analysis for participants.
We will invite players to restore a dried-up dark river with their words about themselves, embarking on a journey of the shadow self. Unlike typical games or narratives, the reason for embarking on this journey, the motivation driving the game forward, is related to the player’s self-analysis. The player’s words will influence this environment and serve as data collection for the portrait of the final giant fish symbolizing the shadow self encountered at the end.