In addition to that, the wearer can control a flock of particles by using mindtricks. A strong mind will result in an attractive force that pulls the particles together into a new organism.
The headset searches your feelings by responding to relaxation. Relaxation leads to alpha waves within the brain's neurons. Alpha waves lead to a wireless signal transmitted to the home automation module and the interactive environment.
Components / Software:
The software application was made in NodeBox for OpenGL, a free, cross-platform library for generating 2D animations with Python programming code. It is built on Pyglet and has built-in support for paths, layers, motion tweening, hardware-accelerated image effects, simple physics and interactivity.
- Nodebox OpenGL.
- Wireless EEG headset (we used a prototype developed by IMEC / Holst Centre)
- EEG software and a homebrew python library to connect to it. (headset.py in the gitrep).
- Loxone home automation module.
- Housing for the electric components.
The full power of our fully operational setup can be witnessed at the following URL:
The source code can be looked at in the git repository.
attractor.py: the graphic environment is an agent based simulation controlled by a physics system of attractive and repulsive forces. It uses circle packing to arrange the different cells into a new structure.
headset.py is the bridge between the EEG software (IMEC) and the environment. It receives a large packet of data over upd and translates that into variables containning the brainwave information.
Below is an example that increases the dimensions of an ellipse based on alpha level.
from nodebox.graphics import *
from headset import Headset
# Create a connection to the headset app.
headset = Headset(‘127.0.0.1’ port=12000)
headset.update(buffer=1024) # Read new EEG data.
x = canvas.width / 2
y = canvas.height / 2
r = headset.alpha.current * 100
ellipse(x, y, r*2, r*2)
canvas.draw = draw
Controlling the lights.
The dimming of the lights was done by using a home automation device which runs as a miniserver.
The module came with software called Loxone config. That enabled us to write a small modular network to connect the relaxation parameter over UDP to the dimmer module, part of the automation configuration.