The Beauty Cam

My experimental camera is a beauty cam in low configuration. When you run the code, two fake eyes and a fake lip would cover your own eyes and lip, also some hearts would appear around your face - showing that you feel blessed and loved. When you click on the screen, colorful strobe lights would flush on the screen, as well as three microphones following your mouth. This is to indicate that the character enjoys all the attention that comes with the external polish.

Design Concept

For the meanings behind the theme, this beauty cam is reflecting the fact that some people, no matter celebrities or ordinary norms, overuses the beauty cams when they post anything on social media. Beauty cams has developed powerful functions that can even change one’s total look in the virtual world. I have heard many stories that internet influencers accidentally turned off their filters or beauty cams when they are live streaming, and the audience saw how their idols really look like. It usually ends up as a disaster because the real person looks way too different than the modifies-version. I feel that beauty cams have become a mask that many people rely on, including myself, when I take selfies with my friends, we usually prefer using beauty cams because it looks better with enhanced face features and various filters. However, sometimes I feel like I become another person when I use beauty cam because it is too exaggerated. In this project I was really trying to find out what does beauty mean? The functions of enlarging eyes and thicken lips seems to become standard adjustments in usual beauty cams. But since when have they become the common rule of beauty? I think beauty can be defined in many different ways and aspects, but the exaggerated style is not something that I personally appreciate.

Design Process

The two other ideas that I had were also related to exaggeration. One is inspired by the clown - they would paint red around their mouse to expatriate their laugh, to help boost the jokes. Clowns are always trying to make people laugh, as a way to prove themselves. I feel like in real life, many of us are always seeking for other people’s approval. It seems like our ideas would sound better with more “yes” from other people. But it might not always be true. For this concept, nothing would happen unless you smile. When you smile, you would be turned into a clown with makeup on. You need to smile to make the program work. The concept was that you need to smile to yourself as a way to approve yourself, not waiting for others to approve of you. Another idea was inspired by Chinese Opera, where the actors can switch their masks so quickly that the audience can’t even notice. In p5, this idea would need an action to trigger the switch-mask feature, which is currently beyond my coding ability. I prefer the idea of beauty cam the most, that’s why I finally went with this concept. I pasted assets of large eyes and thick lips to the camera, in order to express the exaggerated features of the beauty cam. Now it feels like a low configuration version of a beauty cam. The eyes and lips are big enough to cover your own eyes and lips, indicating that the user has totally been “changed” to another person. It is absolutely one's freedom to do so, and some people enjoy being able to have different appearances online. So I added the hearts and allowed them to track around the face, as a way to show users’ satisfaction and confidence. Some internet influencers even gain a lot of attention and exposure because they are so pretty online with heavily edited photos. That’s the reason why I added the colorful strobe lights and microphones.

Assignment Reflection

Playing with the CLM tracker is fun for this project. I had some issues with positioning the assets to the exact place like eyes and mouth. My peer Simone helped me solve the issue by adding the imageMode(CENTER) function. I then explored adding emojis directly into p5, it is interesting that you can paste the emoji into the text() function and use it. Later, I realized that we had to use the array feature, so I put the heart emojis and microphone emojis into two arrays and learnt to use it. It took a while to figure out because the hearts didn’t show in the beginning. I then realized that I was using a 2D array, so there is another array(position) inside of the array(emoji). According to my friend Enoch, it is better to use a Loop to run the array because I am just using the same element in the array. So I took his advice and used the Loop function to run the array - with the help from Enoch, the final code looks neat and elegant.