What stimulates our bodies to make the decisions we do on dating apps like Tinder? That fleeting moment when we swipe either left or right to our heart’s content is filled with boundless emotions — everything from the hot-or-not factor to our own insecurities (will they or won’t they do the same?).
What if that decision (bursting with possibilities as it is) was taken out of your hands and placed in the hands of another? What if the person in control of that decision wasn’t a person at all? What if it was a robot?
The True Love Tinder Robot wants to do just that. Its creator even claims it is “guaranteed” to find you love if you put your fate in its hand. The robot’s inventor Nicole He conceived the contraption by combining the algorithmic matching functions of the dating site with a biometric device.
The robotic hand works with attached sensors that read the galvanic skin response on your palms (basically how sweaty they get) to determine whether to swipe left or right on potential Tinder matches. He built the robot as part of the final project for her Intro to Physical Computing and Intro to Computational Media classes at NYU ITP, reports The Next Web. Her related tweet, presenting a video clip of the hand in action, has gone viral with over 1,700 retweets and even more likes.
I made a robot that reads your body's response as you look at Tinder profiles, and then swipes based on science. pic.twitter.com/xExatPyFX3
— Nicole He (@nicolehe) December 13, 2015
According to her project website, the True Love Tinder Robot “explores the idea that the computer knows us better than we know ourselves, and therefore it has better authority on who we should date than we do.”
For those interested in the science behind the robot, the source code is available on Github. You can also check out He’s build notes at her ITP blog. The robot itself will be available to try out at the ITP Winter Show at NYU on December 20-21.
