Catalogue / Plate 46← All plates
Keep a straight face
The minutes of a parish meeting are read to you. Do not smile. Your face is the controller.
Keep a straight face
The minutes of tonight’s meeting will be read to you, one item at a time. Do not smile. Your camera watches your face on this device only, and the Clerk will minute every smile against the word it happened on.
The camera picture stays on this device. Nothing is recorded or sent, and the only picture that exists afterwards is the card you choose to download.
Remake it
Build a web page called 'Keep a straight face' for an invented Sampleton Parish Council. It reads twelve deadpan items of parish minutes aloud, word by word, with running jokes (a goose, a boat, a bench). The visitor's camera, on their own device only, must not see them smile. Use MediaPipe's face landmarker blendshapes: score = 0.65*mouthSmile + 0.25*cheekSquint + 0.1*mouthDimple, judged against the median of 2.5 seconds of their own neutral face. A crack is 200 ms above half the range. Minute each crack against the word it landed on. At the end show a composure trace, a downloadable card with the frame at the strongest smile, and a #c=N challenge link. Add a no-camera route (hold Space). Never show or store the camera picture.
- Load the face landmarker model and wasm from your own site, never a CDN, and allow camera in that page's headers only.
- Calibrate for 2.5 seconds, take the median as the visitor's neutral, and judge every frame against it.
- Keep the clock running only while a face is seen; pause when it is lost.
- Keep one snapshot canvas, replaced whenever the smile beats the best so far.
Notes: when it suits, when it does not, how it fails
- When it suits
- A staff room, a launch with a sense of humour, an event page, a brand that wants people to laugh in front of it and send the proof to someone.
- When it does not
- A serious setting, or a visitor who cannot or will not use a camera as the main route.
- How it fails
- A camera game that asks for the camera with no reason, judges a face by one fixed number, or keeps the picture. Here the camera is opt-in with a no-camera route (hold Space), smiles are read against the visitor's own neutral face, the model and its files are served from this site, nothing is recorded, and the only picture that exists is the card the visitor chooses to download.
Made after Pete's 'dumb' verdict on the choir and the biscuit game, from research into how the strongest 2026 work uses the visitor's own body: the face reader is the controller, a deadpan register carries the joke, and the result is a card of you.