I tried to think about ideas to measure social interaction between people and deduce things like Tele or Rapport and perceived social ranking.
One hypothesis is that people would look more often at people that they look up to in a social setting and even position themselves to keep these people in a comfortable line of sight.
This idea actually contains one or more camera mounted in a crowded room and software that would identify according to line of sight of people in the room who gazes at who. A counter could score each person according to the number of gazes he or she received and by whom and use it to learn about the social dynamics in the room and perceived social hierarchy of the participants.
Also the algorithm will take into account the way people position themselves and who they are facing. Even if they are talking to a specific person directly they might position themselves in a way that their line of sight will include other people of interest so they can gaze at them from time to time with comfort.
This algorithm can also be used for homeland security purposes to identify suspicious activity not by identifying the actual behavior but by identifying that something has a social effect of drawing attention from people around it.
Software in crowded places can analyze real-time security camera video footage and track faces and their implied line of sight. When suddenly in a short time people change their line of sight to the same area it might be important enough for an operator to be alarmed and make a decision about the severity of the situation.
Another idea assumes that people will modify what they think is a desirable distance between them and other people they move around according to the amount of Tele or “Vibes” they feel toward that person. Watching people in a networking or other mingling event and analyzing the distance people keep from each other as they move around might reveal interesting information about the social dynamics in the group.
Another idea that can be used to better understand the crowd in a presentation, is a laptop with a camera pointed at the crowd that will analyze constantly the body language such as level of movement, facial direction, sound levels from various microphones is exist etc. and gauge level of interest marking it with a color heat map on top of the crowd image. This will make the presenter aware of who is engaged and who is not.
Another idea is to locate in a room people that show eye contact from time to time and seem to mirror some aspects of their appearance for example hand positions, touching hair, leg position, leaning etc. This can help to show people that might have a stronger rapport with each other than with other people around them. They might be interested to get to know each other or already know each other but for some reason prefer to not openly show it.
A final idea for this batch is to analyze color matching and clothing style between people in a crowded place such as a conference or office party, assuming that people that spend much time together or have similar social ties in the group will conform to a certain agreed style or color palette, it may be interesting to try to point out people that stand out as out of synch with the group. It can also be interesting to analyze the level of color and style conformity to the perceived level in the social hierarchy.
