“The idea is about making faces communicate with each other,” he says. He designed the software to recognize facial expressions and their related emotions. While you watch, an algorithm uses the characteristics of your face—the distance between your eyes, the shape of your jaw, the size of your nose—to create a ratio between the values. It does the same for the person on screen. Daniele wrote the software so the ratio would correlate to one of six basic facial expressions (anger, fear, sadness, joy, disgust, and surprise.) When you exhibit empathy—which in this case is determined by how closely your expression mirrors that of the person on screen—the image takes on elements of your face. The more empathy you show, the more the two of you become one.