Faking a Smile Is Easier Than Explaining Why I’m Sad is an interactive installation by Ruth Patir, first shown at Artport Tel Aviv in 2019. In a private booth, viewers face a mirror and a webcam that feeds their expression into an AI trained on emotion recognition. Their detected emotion triggers a 3D avatar—based on the artist’s face—to perform a corresponding dance: belly dance for “happy,” ballet for “surprised,” spanking for “angry,” and so on.

As Animation TD, I developed the system that connected AI facial recognition (via FACS) to real-time animated responses. I created and rigged the avatar in Blender and implemented the interaction in Unity, building a responsive framework that tied emotional data to choreographed movement.