“As artists we have to use our platform to spread awareness and inspire action.” Usher

In the past, artists like Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye and Nina Simone have used music to echo the reality of racial injustice. Following their steps, musician and social activist Usher, produced the song Chains: an anthem to advocate for unarmed victims of violence.

He then challenged us to launch it using today’s modern tools and activate society in any way possible.

Users could interact with the experience by physically facing the screen, symbolizing the notion of “facing up” to racial injustice. We made this possible by accessing the user’s webcam and processing what we could see using web-based face and eye tracking technologies, CLM Trackr & JS Feat.

Originally we developed our own eye gaze algorithms which were very accurate under ‘lab conditions’. However, this didn’t translate well to the real world as regular webcams, different lighting conditions and skin tones prevented the accuracy we needed to calculate eye gaze direction.

To respect the sensitive subject matter, we moved to another solution, picking a library called “clmtrackr”. We then based the solution on head orientation which gave us a good compromise, producing a more fluid experience for a wider audience.

The experience took two months to develop and went live on October 15th, launching exclusively and globally on chains.tidal.com.