Get Emote-ional

I personally use Proteus for my everyday instant messaging, but its always fun to test drive other new chat client that might offer just a little bit more or something wildly new. EmoteMail diverges from the usual laundry list of features of other instant messengers and adds an additional dimension to online communication by capturing facial expressions and indicators of typing speed with graphical cues. An interesting direction that might not catch on because in a sense, people seem to enjoy the anonymity of online chat. Might be interesting to cyber with ;)

Instead of dynamically modifying individual characters, EmoteMail relates contextual cues to each paragraph. The prototype uses a camera and a timer as sensor inputs to capture additional information relating to the paragraph. Reminiscent of the commonly used smileys, the EmoteMail client annotates every paragraph with a small black and white thresholded image of the face of the writer. Each paragraph also includes a background colour representing how much time the paragraph took to compose. If the sender changes their facial expression (perhaps as part of an emotionally meaningful communication) then the small camera grab beside each paragraph reflects this. By capturing a snapshot of the face of the writer with every paragraph, the system attempts to display the fluctuation of the emotions throughout the message, rather than attempting to summarize the whole message as a certain mood.