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Entertainment

Design Studio Device Make An Animation From Brain Activity

I think therefore I animate.

BLANCLAB Opening Titles 2012 from Device on Vimeo.

You may’ve heard of the Emotiv EPOC neuroheadset which lets users use brain activity to control video games and interact with a computer. Device, a design studio in Barcelona, used this piece of hardware to create an animation using primary brain impulses for the opening titles of the Blanc Lab festival.

They invited each person speaking at the festival to complete a challenge using the neuroheadset and by moving their face. The data from the challenge was recorded by the headset, ran through Quartz Composer, and used to animate and generate audio for the opening title. If they completed the challenge correctly their named showed up in the animation. If they failed, they missed out.

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The finished thing has an early lo-fi web aesthetic and joins together all the different challenges into one complete animation, all fuelled by the speakers’ brain activity.

Device explain:

We used the Epoc Neuro Headset device, which allows you to extract three different values: cognitive, expressive and emotive data directly from the brain. Cognitive values refers to mental exercises, like pushing a shape in the space or making it disappear. Expressive values are face movements like smiling or eye blinking. And the emotive ones are mood values like frustration or meditation. So we used the expressive values for the main actions (easier and faster to control) and let the cognitive and emotive control secondary and environmental outputs. The headset data was sent by OSC to Pure Data which controlled all the inputs and the audio parameters, and then to Quartz Composer, where the scenes were set.

Check out the making-of video below:

[via Nerdcore]

@stewart23rd