Painting By Brainwaves

Following the genius of Big Spaceship we’ve implemented “Mashup Fridays” where we spend the day working with the latest technologies to put something random and hopefully interesting together. This week we bought the Mindwave Headset which was featured in the April edition of Wired magazine…

The Idea

We wanted to hack the headset and port the data into Adobe Flash where it could be manipulated and hopefully used to create some mind controlled artwork. The rules were simple, no constants were allowed, all data should come from the headset thereby making whatever mess we created 100% mind made.

The Solution

The Mindwave headset mainly measures Meditation and Attention, however, it also measure brain Alpha, Beta etc so we had plenty of variables to play with. The tricky part was writing those variables into an algorithm that would paint something more Pollock than Tracey Emin.

The final solution was to create our own curve algoritm using methods from both Cartogrammar and Paul Tondeur which would draw between points derived from brain data. The X coordinate was taken from the meditation, Y from attention and others like colour from the other variables like Alpha Beta etc.

Below is our initial version of the “artwork” (using the term loosely). We will be updating this post hopefully with a more aesthetic version in the near futures as well as a video of it working.