Author: KZ
Final Project Draft WIP
This mixed reality experience uses a headset and a brain sensing headband to create an immersive before bedtime experience. While lying on a bed with the devices on, participants see a fence appear in front of them. In the augmented view, sheep jump over the fence, moving from one side of the bedroom to the other. The sheep’s movements are controlled by the participant’s brainwave patterns (from EEG data, which is a method to record an electrogram of the spontaneous electrical activity of the brain).
TP9 and TP10: Temporal Lobes & AF7 and AF8: Prefrontal Cortex
Currently I’m only dealing with values that has to do with their focus level (calculated based on mathematical relations between brainwaves). Users can also use blinking to count the sheep, though the blink detection values are still being fine tuned to improve accuracy.
Final Project Proposal
I’m currently working on a project outside of class that combines a brain sensing headband and a VR headset to create a mixed reality experience. The brain sensing headset I borrowed from the studio doesn’t capture accurate EEG information, but I view this project as more of a proof of concept. I might continue working on that and make it my final project.
I’m also considering using some kind of special capturing equipment to create an experimental project(e.g. motion capture, drone), but I haven’t decided on that yet.
PersonInTime
Person In Time WIP
My current plan is to create an installation of a box with a peephole and a circular plane mounted on top. When users place their eye in front of the peephole, a proximity sensor will detect their presence and send the data to my unity project. Unity will receive the signal when someone is at the peephole, then record a video of their eye and capture the blinking.
The Unity project will project the captured eye videos onto the circular plane in real time, arranging them into a collage that forms a circular shape. The eyes will blink in sync every second, mimicking the movement of a clock’s second hand.
Looking Outwards 04
This project by Michael Sedbon created two artificial ecosystems of photosynthetic bacteria competing for light to explore the emergent behavior of technologies as life forms. I found this concept particularly interesting because I’m currently taking a class related to modeling cognitive and neurobiological systems of adaptive decision making, which shares some similarities with this concept in certain ways.
https://www.creativeapplications.net/arduino/cmd-experiment-in-bio-algorithmic-politics/
This project by Christian Mio Loclair is driven by a custom GAN solution called RayGan, which learns possible human poses through 120,000 postures of human bodies without understanding motion sequences. Visual elements like textures and colors are also generated through a separate GAN trained on a curated dataset from visual artists. I found the visualization of these human poses intriguing.
https://www.creativeapplications.net/openframeworks/blackberry-winter/
This project created by the Amana Prototyping Lab transformed basic rhythmic gymnastics ribbon movements into algorithms to create a systematized performance simulated in a 3D virtual environment and executed by the robot arm. The goal was to represent the sensibility of human movement using harsh robot mechanics, which is a concept I found quite interesting as it experimented with the contrast between fluid human motion and the rigid nature of robots.
Tree Scars
TypologyMachineWIP
I have two concepts in mind that I’m still developing. The first is about a tree hollow where audiences can whisper secrets. These whispers would be quiet so a special microphone designed to capture the sound waves is needed. These captured waves would then be visualized as ring like patterns, similar to tree rings and projected inside the tree hollow. The final deliverable would include individual visualized sound waves, as well as a combined projection of all the whispers inside the tree hollow, which is an overall display of sound collected.
The second idea explores eye contact. Inspired by the apple vision pro’s features, which aim to project a video of your eyes and your face to make communication more natural while wearing the headset, I want to look into the sensation of communicating with someone who’s there but not fully present, which can create an uncanny effect. In this piece, I envision an audience peering through a peephole into a space. As they look through, their eyes are captured by a hidden camera and projected onto an average looking face? (haven’t really fleshed out this part) The projection would create an experience where they appear to make eye contact with themselves, but something feels slightly off. I’d like to capture and analyze the subtle movements of their eyes as part of this experience.
Pocket Postulating
I experimented with slow mo, timelapse, and light painting (long exposure) techniques to capture fire in different ways. For the slow mo video, I placed my phone on a stand, held a lighter, and waved it in front of the camera. In the timelapse, I lit a candle and recorded the wax melting into liquid over 30 minutes. For the light painting with long exposure, I kept my phone on a stand and moved the lit candle around, with each photo having an exposure time of about 30 seconds.
Reading 1
The reading discusses how in earlier scientific practices, scientists believed that combining various examples would create a more comprehensive representation of the subject. They often created “ideal” scientific illustrations rather than strictly adhering to objective truth. An example given was a drawing of the life cycle of an oak egger moth, where multiple stages of its growth were combined into a single image. In contrast, later scientific practices shifted toward using photography to depict specific objects, focusing on capturing “reality” as it appears in a particular moment. I find it interesting how scientists shifted their approach to depicting scientific practices. Later in the reading, it also discusses the early skepticism surrounding photography due to edited, staged, or manipulated images, and how the discoveries of X rays and radiation expanded the possibilities of photographic observation. I think that capturing what is visible or invisible to the human eye, along with the use of image manipulation, creates new opportunities to merge scientific realism with artistic interpretation.