THE SHAPE OF FEELING
The Shape of Feeling animates your emotions as you speak. It listens to you express yourself and visualizes your current emotional state through digital sculptures I call emotion-blobs.
Each emotion-blob represents a different feeling and is designed based on how that emotion actually feels in your mind and body. There are 35 in the feeling library, each one capturing the cognitive and somatic traits of a specific emotion, helping you recognize what you're feeling, instantly and visually.
Each emotion-blob represents a different feeling and is designed based on how that emotion actually feels in your mind and body. There are 35 in the feeling library, each one capturing the cognitive and somatic traits of a specific emotion, helping you recognize what you're feeling, instantly and visually.
This project was created for Parsons’ Design and Technology 2025 Thesis Show, Mosaic. At the show, people interacted with the platform inside a soundproof booth, giving them a private space to share their unfiltered thoughts and watch their emotions take shape in real time.
The exhibition was just one example of how The Shape of Feeling could be used. It could support emotional awareness and self-regulation in therapy, act as a tool for nonverbal emotional expression in classrooms (like helping kids learn emotion labeling), or work as a personal journaling and self-tracking tool.
The exhibition was just one example of how The Shape of Feeling could be used. It could support emotional awareness and self-regulation in therapy, act as a tool for nonverbal emotional expression in classrooms (like helping kids learn emotion labeling), or work as a personal journaling and self-tracking tool.
It uses real-time speech and natural language processing to analyze your emotional undertone. The system then pulls from the library of 35 digital sculptures I built using Three.js and vanilla JavaScript.
Read the full research and design process in my MFA thesis paper for an inside look at how I selected the emotions, the logic behind capturing their somatic and cognitive qualities, the technical tools used, and the potential use-cases.
Click here to read
Click here to read
Tools Used:
HTML & CSS
Vanilla JavaScript
Three.js
Web Speech API
OpenAI GPT-4 API
Render
HTML & CSS
Vanilla JavaScript
Three.js
Web Speech API
OpenAI GPT-4 API
Render