Plasma Ball Concentration Game (openFrameworks + Neurosky’s EEG Mindset)

December 21, 2012

Project Summary

This project relates to the brain-computer interface work I’ve been doing for my thesis. As I will soon be creating generative animations that responds to brain activity, which are part of a digital graphic novel, I wanted to do a prototype of a visually complex animation that was dependent on a person’s brain activity. This project was written in openFrameworks and uses a Neurosky Mindset to link a player’s attention level to the intensity of electricity being generated from a sphere in the middle of the screen. The meat of the code is a recursive function that creates individual lightning strikes at a frequency inversely proportional to the attention parameter calculated by the Neurosky EEG headset. The project was visually inspired by the tesla coil and those cool electricity lamps that were really popular in the 90s (see below).

Once the connection between the Neurosky headset and the user’s computer has strong connectivity, the user can press the ‘b’ key (for brain) to link their EEG with the plasma ball. At any point the user can press the ‘g’ key (for graph) to see a HUD that displays a bar graph of their attention value on a scale from 0-100. The graph also shows the connectivity value of the device and the average attention value, calculated over the previous 5 seconds, being used to dictate the frequency of the electricity.

In order to get this application working on your computer, you must first download and install the Neurosky Thinkgear connector. You should be able to get it working with any bluetooth enabled Neurosky device; I’ve documented how to do so in the readme file on my github. You can get my code for the project on my Github page here: https://github.com/crussoma/conorRussomanno_algo2012/tree/master/Conors_Final

Also, if you just want to see the recursive electricity code working independent of a person’s EEG, download and install the app lightningBall (not lightnightBall_brain) from my github.

Project Video

To see this project in action check out my demo reel and jump to 35s.

Visual Inspiration

Screenshots

References

My code uses some of the logic and algorithms Esteban Hufstedler’s processing sketch:http://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/2924

Additionally, a big shout out to Akira Hayasaka for writing the Neurosky openFrameworks addon that I used to pull this off:  https://github.com/Akira-Hayasaka/ofxThinkGear