COVID-19 has altered the way we interact with large groups, forcing us to turn to a digital environment. The academic world has been hit hard, forcing college students to learn via Teams, or other video sharing platforms. In the virtual environment, information is still transferred from teacher to student, however the non-verbal cues of the students to the professor are lost. Professors have a harder time of “reading the room” as virtually every student has their camera and microphone turned off.

By creating an emotional and gesture tracking system, we can restore a small piece of human interaction by emulating how a real classroom would function. Creating a Chrome extension that can read in a student’s emotion or capture certain gestures in real time and relay that back to the teacher can provide a small sense of normalcy. Teachers can easily see who is interested, confused, or have left the class as naturally as they could if they were face-to-face. This will remove the awkward silences when a question is asked and can also help teachers learn how engaging they truly are in lecture.