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Controlling Canadian landmarks with your mind

 Uncategorized  3 Responses »
Feb 132010
 
Using Thought Control to Manipulate Lighting - InteraXon

Using 'Thought Control' to Manipulate Lighting - InteraXon

Canadian company Interaxon are using Neurosky ThinkGear headsets to allow the public to control lighting installations at major landmarks around Canada, during the Winter Olympic games. Click on the image above to go to their website.

Now you too can use the exact same headset with GlovePIE (in theory) to control your computer games. I haven’t tested it, but in theory GlovePIE should now support Neurosky headsets.

Personally I think Interaxon are being a bit dishonest pretending they invented these things, and selling the idea to other companies, when really they are just using Neurosky’s products. Especially when the Neurosky product is so limited compared to its competitors like Emotiv. Perhaps Interaxon are patent fascists who are trying to make a business by patenting all the obvious things you could do with someone else’s technology, although that’s more a US thing phenomenon rather than a Canadian one. Or perhaps they are just trying to make money by promoting something companies didn’t know about.

Anyway, their “Bright Ideas” installation looks really cool. So check out: http://interaxon.ca/featured_project from now until the end of the Winter Olympics.

 Posted by Carl Kenner at 10:59 pm  Tagged with: ,

Wild Divine Lightstone in GlovePIE

 GlovePIE  6 Responses »
Jan 142010
 

Here’s a strange input device you don’t see everyday:

Wild Divine Lightstone

It’s the Lightstone for the game Journey To Wild Divine, sponsored by renowned con-artists and fraudsters: Deepak Chopra, and Andrew Weil.

Although portrayed as some kind of magic crystal, it’s actually a USB biofeedback device that measures your pulse, and how much electricity your skin can conduct. Your skin conducts more electricity when you are stressed (because of sweat). With those two readings your computer can know other things, like: how hard you are exercising, how stressed you are, how relaxed you are, how fit you are, and whether you are telling the truth or lying.

The game it originally came with is basically a relaxation game, where you have to go through a variety of relaxation exercises in order to progress.

Journey To Wild Divine

I hear the game is actually quite fun and useful, if you can tolerate the anti-science bigotry and outright nonsense.

I just added partial support for the LightStone to GlovePIE 0.42, which I’ll be releasing shortly. Currently GlovePIE 0.42 can only read the Skin Conductance Level, and the “Heart Rate Variance” (it goes up to indicate each pulse). I haven’t added code to detect peaks in the HRV yet, so it can’t tell you more useful information like your pulse rate yet (unless you script it yourself).

Actually GlovePIE already supported measuring your heart-rate, if you had a Concept 2 Rowing Machine (“ergo”) connected to your computer by USB.

But the idea of a device that can measure your mental state for game playing is part of a growing trend these days, with the recent release of no less than 3 competing devices that directly measure brainwaves with an EEG: Neuosky’s ThinkGear, Emotiv’s Epoc, and OCZ’s NIA. I’ll talk about them in a coming post.

 Posted by Carl Kenner at 4:00 am  Tagged with: , , ,
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