Background

Despite the focus on diversity and “being our true selves” in today’s world, there was a sense that many people were finding it difficult to find their true selves due to various biases arising from such factors as one’s environment, education, and experience. Meanwhile, the mission of Panasonic’s design studio, FUTURE LIFE FACTORY, is to pursue initiatives that explored what enriched lives looked like in the future and to bring that vision to life. To address both of these challenges at the same time, we took Panasonic's proprietary emotion-sensing technology, which is able to analyze a person’s emotion, condition, and facial cues, to develop and design an experiential program that analyzed and datafied a person’s “true self” and made it visible in the form of “aura.”

Describe the creative idea (40% of vote)

Despite the focus on diversity in today’s world, many people are finding it difficult to find their true selves due to various biases arising from such factors as one’s environment, education, and experience. To solve this problem, we took Panasonic's proprietary emotion-sensing technology, which is able to analyze a person’s emotion, condition, and facial cues, and developed a program that generates a total of 288 “aura patterns” through various combinations of these three elements (the program is designed to express emotion as color, condition as texture, and intuition as shape). Through this, we provided a meditation experience that enabled people to truly see and know themselves. We envision this to eventually lead to a future where we can create happy relationships with all kinds of people, not just in terms of race or culture, but also with people we’ve only met online to people we feel we know well.

Describe the execution (40% of vote)

Using Panasonic's proprietary emotion-sensing technology, we analyzed a person’s facial expression, emotion, and physiognomy, and developed a program that generates a total of 288 “aura patterns” through various combinations of these three elements (the program is designed to express emotion as color, condition as texture, and intuition as shape). In addition, the aura generated by the program will show up differently depending on the person’s condition as well, just as a person's impression changes depending on how they’re feeling that day. This reflects the fact that what we are doesn’t remain static, but is constantly changing. The program was unveiled at CES2021 and is now a permanent installation in Panasonic's showroom.

List the results (20% of vote)

At CES2021, it was among those that received the most attention and inquiries out of all the technologies Panasonic unveiled at the event. It has led to collaborations with other companies, which are currently in progress. One was a joint project with a TV station that was unveiled at CES2022. In the future, we believe this technology can be effectively used for member-matching during team creations or for reading the emotions of other people when interacting in virtual spaces.