The Tinder True Love Robot Reads Your Body to Swipe Left or Right

By Saqib Shah Published December 15, 2015

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?

Recommended Videos

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.

Former Contributor

Saqib Shah is a Twitter addict and film fan with an obsessive interest in pop culture trends. In his spare time he can be…

Topics

Emerging Tech

Anthropic’s sensitive internal data was exposed, and AI helped make it happen

Even the company behind Claude isn't immune to AI-powered security threats, as researchers discovered some worrying vulnerabilities.

Claude Anthropic Featured

AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.

The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.

Emerging Tech

A new startup wants to fix the military’s working-dog shortage with cloning and gene editing

Promising pitch, plenty of unanswered questions about the dogs.

a new startup wants to fix the militarys working dog shortage with cloning and gene editing warhound featured image

Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.

Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).

Emerging Tech

AI can describe a picture, but it still struggles to understand blind users

A University of Maryland study finds that Be My AI often buries useful answers in lengthy descriptions, leaving blind users to work harder to get the information they need.

Blind Man using walking stick

AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.

The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.