Between November 24 and December 15, visitors can find The Museum of Feelings open at Brookfield Place in Lower Manhattan's Battery Park City. A collaboration between maker of home fragrance products, Glade, and creative firm, Radical Media, the exhibit hosts a series of interactive installations that merge colour theory, new media, and data science to explore the ways that visitors feel and express their emotions.

At the Museum of Feelings, each of five rooms is themed around a particular emotion: Optimism, Joy, Invigorated, Exhilarated, and Calm. With kaleidoscopic mirrors and architecture, motion-sensing mood lighting, and reality-bending set designs, each emotion is also accompanied with a scent to invoke the emotion.

In the final room of the exhibit, visitors can assess a graph displaying moods in cities across the country. In an algorithm created by Radical Media, the graph sources data from current weather, stock prices, and the aggregate of social media within a city to visualize its mood in a way that recalls memories of the days when mood rings were popular.

Anyone outside of New York who wants to experience the Museum of Feelings for themselves can also visit the website to try out the Moodlens app. The Moodlens app borrows technology from the data visualizations of location-based moods, but adds in biometrics capabilities from accelerometer metrics on the mobile app to skin salinity and heart rate measurements at the on-site polygraph. The result is a wall of real-time selfies generated with the colourful Moodlens filtered over users and a wealth of beautiful and mesmerizing data.

In conveying the primary message that the power of smell can drastically affect one's emotions, The Museum of Feelings also comes with it a host of innovative and interactive design tools that really push visitors to rethink how they experience and express emotions. You can read more about Protein's interest in the future of museums or find other examples of innovative museums that Protein has written about.