On this page
What we made
Pyna was a small device that changed the music and colour of a room in response to a person’s facial expression. My team built the first version in three days as first-year engineering students. We won the hackathon, developed the idea for another six months, and demonstrated it at Maker Faire Turin and Maker Faire Rome 2018.
The project was memorable less because the prototype was polished than because people immediately understood it. They could approach a physical object, see the room respond, and start a conversation about what technology can—and cannot—understand about us. At Maker Faire Rome, that conversation also led to a video interview with Il Messaggero.
What I learned
Pyna was my first experience carrying a technical idea beyond a classroom: from a rushed prototype to a public installation used by strangers. It taught me to work across software, hardware, interaction, and presentation—and to explain limitations as clearly as capabilities.
The central limitation is important. A facial expression is not a reliable measurement of mood, and our idea of using music to improve it was not grounded in psychological research. Pyna should be read as an exploratory student project, not as a wellbeing product.
Technical notes
A Raspberry Pi, camera, speaker, and 3D-printed enclosure formed the physical device. The Pi detected a nearby face and sent an image to a private server, where a third-party service classified the expression. Our software translated that output into a light colour and a Spotify selection informed by the user’s preferred genres, then controlled Spotify and Philips Hue through their APIs.
The system also recorded the classifications in a small dashboard. That history made the demonstration legible, but it did not make the underlying inference more objective.