This DIY Photo Booth Evaluates Your Fear Level

Görkem built this Halloween photo booth that analyzes subjects' fear levels and prints pictures with the results.

Photo booths are a lot of fun and are always big hits at events. People love taking pictures of themselves in their party attire and a photo booth gives them permission to do so, usually with some props to spice up the scene. But most photo booths only provide a printed picture as a memento, which is a bit anticlimactic. Görkem wanted more dramatic results on Halloween, so he built this photo booth that analyzes subjects' fear levels.

From the perspective of Halloween partygoers, this "Fear Booth" looks and operates like a standard portable photo booth that you might see at charity function or high school reunion. It is a wood box that sits atop a tripod, with a screen that displays a preview of the image, a button to snap a photo, and a printer that spits out the captured picture. But it has an extra feature that you've never seen in a photo booth before: the ability to detect and quantify a person's fear.

After capturing a photo, the Fear Booth begins to analyze the subject's facial expression to determine how strongly it correlates with fear. It then shows that "fear level" as a bar graph on the screen. Finally, it prints the photo with the subject's fear level percentage and a qualitative descriptor like "Scream Queen."

This is possible because there is a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B inside the Fear Booth. It runs DeepFace for OpenCV, which performs facial recognition and facial attribute analysis. It can guess a person's age, gender, race, and most importantly for this project, their emotional state. In this case, it only cares about how strongly the subject's facial expression correlates with fear.

The display is an old portable cathode-ray tube (CRT) TV that receives a composite video signal from the Raspberry Pi. After making its judgment, the Fear Booth prints the photo and the evaluation on an Adafruit Mini Thermal Receipt Printer. That doesn't produce high-quality photos, but they're cheap enough that Görkem didn't have to worry about losing a bunch of money during the Halloween party.

Görkem didn't provide an update in his tutorial about how the Fear Booth was received, but we have to assume that it was very popular. It would only be natural for partygoers to compete to find out who could show the most fear.

Cameron Coward
Writer for Hackster News. Proud husband and dog dad. Maker and serial hobbyist. Check out my YouTube channel: Serial Hobbyism
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