Final Project – Sensor Metaphors Han Liu

   My sensor metaphor is achieved with a portable brainwave detector — “Thinkgear”. 

   The metaphor is about “the feedback loop of individual life”. There are two kinds of feedback loop —positive and negative. In the positive feedback, the program will  play appropriate music and  satisfying videos (splendid dynamic kaleidoscopic patterns) to enhance your  ability to focus and meditate. In the negative feedback, it will do the opposite. The feedbacks  are metaphors of how the world treat a individual — sometimes the harder you try, the more you achieve (positive feedback); However, at sometime the harder you try, the more  you get from the opposite side and that in turn curbs you from achieving your goals(negative feedback).

   The feedbacks are presented in graphical and sound effects, according to the data collected from the brainwave detector. 

   The brainwave is disintegrated into a series of frequencies through Fourier transformation, while attention and meditation values are calculated based on the amplitudes of these frequencies. The balls at the bottom of the window  jump according to the amplitude of the correspoding  frequencies ( frequencies increase from left to right), the texture of the balls can be either the player’s own face video captured from computer camera or a kaleidoscopic pattern based on the video captured, which makes it in harmony with the background pattern.  This disintegration is also a metaphor of disintergrating player’s own mind into different visual parts: higher frequencies represents highly active and focused mind and lower frequencies represents subconscious and relaxed states of mind. 

    The playing rate of the kaleidoscopic pattern is based on the value of attention. The more focused the player is, the faster the pattern moves. Similarily, the music  is controlled by both the attention and meditation level. In the positive feedback, the general effects will encourage the player to meditate and focus — the rotating pattern has a center point to help you focus and the meditation music will increase its volume and make some change as the meditation value increases. In the negative feedback, the pattern is evil and ugly and does not have a center point, the background sounds are chaotic and disturbing. If the player could still be very focused or meditate very well, the pattern will change very fast and the sounds will be even more noisy and disturbing to disrupt the player.

     Check the documentation video and have fun!

 

        

     

     

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