
Irina Benedyk,
Assistant Professor
CSEE Department
University at Buffalo

Project: Wheel of Emotion
Making the invisible impact of our emotional interactions visible.
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Wheel of Emotion is an immersive interactive installation that sits at the intersection of art, engineering, and social psychology. It transforms the abstract concept of human connection into a tangible, luminous experience, exploring how we influence one another’s emotional states in real-time.

Social Experiment Design: How it Works?
Participants become part of a living canvas through a four-step journey:
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Calibration (The App): Before entering the arena, participants use a custom mobile app to define their current emotional state across a 8-dimension scale. This creates a unique "emotional fingerprint" for that moment. Participants are encouraged to reflect their real mood.
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Immersion (The Wearable): Participants wear a specialized wearable device (smart coat or headpiece). Through Bluetooth connectivity, the garment illuminates, translating their digital emotional data into a specific color spectrum following wheel of emotion color coding.
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The Exchange (Interaction): Participants enter the interaction zone. Communication is non-verbal. To interact, two people simply bring their phones close together. In that moment, an algorithm calculates an "emotional exchange"—simulating how one person’s mood impacts the other.
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Reflection (The Data): Upon leaving the zone, the app reveals the invisible aftermath. Participants can view how their mood shifted during the session: Did you absorb the joy of others? Did you lift someone’s spirits, or were you drained by the crowd?
The Social Experiment
The core of this project is to observe how visible emotional information alters human behavior. The installation cycles between two distinct modes to test a hypothesis: