Olivia Pasian, Paul Van Rijn, Kasper Zhang

"“Blue Gaze” is an emotional animatronic bird who looks at the people around it and reacts with an animated dance that expresses its feelings. It’s made up of a cardboard, paper, servos, an Arduino, and code. The bird uses the camera in its chest and software to count the number of people in its view — and to assess where they are looking. Too many people or prolonged stares make the bird uncomfortable, but it is happy to have a visitor or two. The emotional responses are not based on a real bird’s behaviour and are not necessarily an anthropomorphic representation, but rather a unique personality with three set states: The first is neutral, where the bird calmly looks around and gently flaps its wings. The second is happy, where the bird excitedly bops up and down and shows off its feathers. The third state is stressed, where the bird fully tilts itself down and anxiously twitches its wings and head. Conceptually, “Blue Gaze” seeks to represent the power imbalance and discomfort of an objectifying gaze. It encourages visitors to read the bird’s body language to consider the effect of their interactions. The primary hardware components of the bird are four servo motors connected to an Arduino Nano33 IOT, mounted on a protoboard which is connected to a laptop via USB cables. The laptop is running p5.js code which sends servo angles to the Arduino, connecting the body tracking data from the camera to the servo animations, then calculating the emotional states with case switching. "