Recent Royal College of Art (RCA) design graduate David Hedberg’s Smile TV is more than a loving homage to the good old ‘campfire inside the living room.’ Made from an open frame CRT monitor and equipped with a computer vision system, the unsuspecting television set turns the medium’s engagement pattern on its head: instead of making you smile at on-screen silliness, you have to “smile to watch.”
Only when you do – and for as long as you do – will Smile TV reveal its otherwise scrambled broadcast. “This project grew out from experimenting with facial recognition and image manipulation,”
