Poker Face: a party game where your face is the only tell (built in public)

This is a submission for the Presage SmartSpectra SDK Challenge

🚧 Built in public. This post is updated as the project moves forward. The build log at the end shows what is done and what is still planned. Anything not marked as done is a plan, not a working feature yet.

What I Built

Poker Face is a party game for a room of friends and one webcam.

One player sits in the hot seat and has a single job: keep a straight face. Everyone else has 60-90 seconds to crack them with awkward questions, terrible jokes, fake bluffs or plain staring.

The game watches for the moments your face gives you away:

• a micro-smile you tried to swallow;
• a nervous blink;
• an expression that slips for half a second.

Each one is a crack, marked live on screen for the whole room to see. At the end of the round you get a replay timeline with every crack pinned to the moment it happened, so everyone can see exactly which joke broke you.

What it is not: a lie detector. The question the game asks is "did you crack?", never "are you lying?". Physiological lie detection is not reliable, and the game never makes claims about truth, health or stress. It only reacts to what your face visibly lets slip.

Demo

Coming soon...

Code

Repository: github.com/teofurlan/poker-face

How It Responds to Human Signals

The design splits the SmartSpectra signals by speed:

• Fast signals become cracks. Expression probabilities, blink detection and talking detection react in real time. A crack is a deviation from your own baseline, calibrated during the first seconds of your turn, so a naturally smiley person isn't punished for their resting face. Talking detection separates "answering a question" from "holding still", so answering doesn't count as a crack.
• Slow signals become pressure. Pulse (a 12-second average) and breathing (a 30-second average) are too slow to react to a single joke, so they don't produce verdicts. They feed a pressure meter that builds tension across the round instead.
• Holding still is the rule. SmartSpectra vitals need a stationary subject, and in Poker Face sitting still is part of the game anyway.

Integration details (SDK, platform, event latency and thresholds) will be added after the technical spike.

Prize Categories

Most Creative or Delightful Use.

Most human-sensing apps point the camera at you to help you calm down. Poker Face points it at you so your friends can try to make you lose it. It turns a sensing SDK into a shared, social moment: the screen is for the whole room, the sensor reads one brave volunteer, and the best part of the round is the replay where everyone sees exactly when you broke.

Consent and Data Handling

Design intent; this section will be updated to match the final build.

• Explicit opt-in per player. Every player agrees on screen before their own turn. Nobody is analyzed just for being in the room.
• The camera runs only during your round, with a visible indicator, and stops when the round ends.
• No video is recorded, stored or uploaded. Only the list of crack events (a timestamp and type) is kept, in memory, to draw the replay. It is cleared when the session ends.
• Network: SmartSpectra processes frames on-device. The SDK contacts the Presage backend to validate the API key; any SDK telemetry will be documented here once confirmed.
• No health or truth claims. The game does not diagnose, measure stress clinically, or decide whether anyone is lying.

Agent Session

Coming soon: curated slices of the coding-agent session used to plan and build the game.

Build log

• 2026-11-06: Idea and framing decided; repository created; planning in progress. Next: a technical spike to measure how fast expression and blink events arrive (the go/no-go for live cracks).