Social Media Happiness Expression Through the Virtual Reality: Cultural Differences on Instagram

Abstract

The social media happiness expression through the virtual reality analyzes Instagram photographic data to identify factors predictive of happiness from the Western and the Eastern cultures. The emotional expressions (photographs), hashtags (words), demographics (gender, age, and locations), and pose (head tilt, body turn, posture) were used as factors to detect an individual’s various happiness expression. This research observed the patterns of the photographic dataset to discover the universal happiness expression today through social media, in particular Instagram. We integrated the computational methods from image processing and machine learning to obtain practical psychological indicators from photographic data. We observed one’s perception of happiness was significantly influenced by the communication methods both photographic and hashtags data as well as their own culture through social media. This research centralized disparate archives of happiness expressions with photographic data from Instagram using a theoretical, artistic, and quantitative methods. The photographic data and written data are in the process of compiling into divergent visualization as a Virtual Reality, which will provide users the opportunity to identify the thought-provoking patterns and navigate the photographic data and written data at the extensive perspective from an individual perspective. This research addresses the representation of one’s social media image with the pressure on the external viewpoint and creates an interactive platform of the direct comparison in diverse social and cultural contexts of happiness expression on social media.