Reaction Roullette

Inspiration

People are passionate about sharing their experiences online. With video platforms such as YouTube, many people share their reactions to videos online. With the exciting new APIs that are part of the Microsoft Cognitive Services suite, we can now leverage the Azure public cloud to quantify and analyze these reactions as people watch the video.

What it does

Reaction Roullette allows you to easily capture your reaction and quantify it using the Emotion API from Cognitive Services. The platform takes care of capturing, transcoding, storing and displaying your reaction to the video. See how others react, and share your experience online.

How I built it

Reaction Roullette is built using ASP.net Core 1.0. This allows us to quickly scaffold and build out a web application with minimal thought to the details of handling the web request. Video and reaction data is stored in SQL Azure and uses Entity Framework 7 for manipulation and retrieval. Videos that are uploaded through the site are transcoded and stored in Azure Storage. From there, the videos are processed by the Emotion API, part of the Cognitive Services. Results and aggregate information is then displayed back to the user.

Challenges I ran into

The Emotion API is still in preview and is likely extremely popular. We ran into very high rate limiting early on. We solved this by creating several accounts and distributing the load among them. The documentation around the Emotion API for video is still evolving and has lots of opportunity for improvement.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We are proud that we were able to accomplish this project in 24 hours, including sleep. This simply would not be possible without the powerful new APIs from Microsoft Cognitive Services.

What I learned

What's next for Reaction Roullette There are so many opportunities for a video reaction quantization platform. From analytics of existing videos to crowd sourcing reactions for video management and indexing, these powerful new APIs will allow ever more insights into the human side of our world.