Nostalgia Room @ MIT Media Lab

Project team: Rahul Budhiraja, Dhairya Dand, Anirudh Sharma

Can your information on social networking websites be used to create emotional experiences? The Nostalgia Room aims at providing such an experience by creating an interactive environment using your facebook profile that would evoke memories from your past. At the signup booth, the user enters his/her facebook login details and a ranking algorithm ranks their pictures using the picture’s tags, comments, likes and album number. The top 100 pictures determined by the algorithm are downloaded and a special badge made from the user’s facebook details is printed. Printing the badge takes about a minute, which gives us enough time to download the images and automatically logout the user. After the badge is printed, the user proceeds to the entrance of the Nostalgia Room where he/she scans the badge using the badge scanner. The scanner provides an easy way for different users to login to the room using a QR code printed onto the badge. Once the badge is scanned, the user enters the Nostalgia Room. The Nostalgia room is a dark room with thick black curtains on 3 sides and a projection screen on the front wall. The images downloaded earlier are used by our visualization software and projected onto the wall. The projected visuals are viewed from a swing in the center of the room which also controls the pace and flow of the entire experience. The dark room, your pictures, the swing and a specially chosen soundtrack all contribute to an emotional experience specific to the user. The entire experience lasts for 6 minutes. At the end of the experience, the downloaded images are deleted.

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