Feelings Translated to Plants

Ambient Biomedia is an investigative project about using living beings, in particular plants, to display human lifestyle problems information. The working principle of our systems is taking data about the lifestyle aspect that the user wants to monitor, such as time spent with somebody, health aspects or bad habits, and semantically couple it into an aspect of a living being. The user would merge the plant with his daily environment, following the evolution of his problem’s state in a non intrusive way. Thanks to the empathic link existing between human and other living beings, the user would see himself reflected on the plant, feeling sorry for herself, meditating about his problem and hopefully, taking measures to solve it.

The geekyness of the project becomes apparent in the second frame of the comic: When the kid feels bad, dad doesn't notice. But when the plant feels bad, dad notices it straight away. That is, well.. rather comical! Of course, in the end the plant will probably reside in a different location than the kid and the system will allow dad to stay connected to the home base while working at the office.

The project is run by Adria Bassaganyes and Ben Salem from the Eindhoven University of Technology as part of an extensive ambient intelligence project in co-operation with Singapore National University’s Mixed Reality Lab

See also: Dataplant, Botanicalls. Thanks Ronald.