CASPAR SCHIRDEWAHN

game & interaction design based in Berlin

currently freelancing in
cross media gamified
theater productions

cv
contact
legal



Self-Inflicted Empathy
  READ  
Year:
2020
Year:
2020
Self-Inflicted Empathy is my bachelor thesis for my Game Design degree. The question I asked myself was how emotional experiences can be made tangible in human-machine communication. This includes AI-based automated emotional understanding, presentation, visualisation and finally reception by the user.
My Role:
 For the final thesis, I had to work on a design project, concretise it through explorative prototyping, produce a working solution and document the process in a meaningful way. While the programming goal, the final application, changed over the course of my work, the basis remained the same. I wanted to use MIT's Deep Moji AI model to develop a reflective application. 
Self-Inflicted Empathy is my bachelor thesis for my Game Design degree. The question I asked myself was how emotional experiences can be made tangible in human-machine communication. This includes AI-based automated emotional understanding, presentation, visualisation and finally reception by the user.
 
My Role:
 For the final thesis, I had to work on a design project, concretise it through explorative prototyping, produce a working solution and document the process in a meaningful way. While the programming goal, the final application, changed over the course of my work, the basis remained the same. I wanted to use MIT's Deep Moji AI model to develop a reflective application.
Team:





 Caspar Schirdewahn
Game Design
Programming
Thesis
Result:
The initial aim was to program a reactive diary that would generate a small planet per day from the user's entries, based on the emotions detected, reflecting the mood of the day. The idea was to create a small solar system per week that could be explored and viewed retrospectively. 

After I had set up and tested private servers for the use of the Deep Moji AI model, it became increasingly clear that the originally planned diary application would go beyond the scope of the thesis. However, the development steps of this approach are also documented in the thesis up to this point. 

Instead, I concentrated on writing a Unity plugin and making it accessible using the new Unity UI system, which allows easy access to the AI model and to classify the resulting emoticons into self-assigned emotions, in order to enable follow-up projects.
 Team: Caspar Schirdewahn
Game Design
Programming
Thesis
Result: The initial aim was to program a reactive diary that would generate a small planet per day from the user's entries, based on the emotions detected, reflecting the mood of the day. The idea was to create a small solar system per week that could be explored and viewed retrospectively. 

After I had set up and tested private servers for the use of the Deep Moji AI model, it became increasingly clear that the originally planned diary application would go beyond the scope of the thesis. However, the development steps of this approach are also documented in the thesis up to this point. 

Instead, I concentrated on writing a Unity plugin and making it accessible using the new Unity UI system, which allows easy access to the AI model and to classify the resulting emoticons into self-assigned emotions, in order to enable follow-up projects.