Week 11&12 - Final Project progress & play/user testing
The past two weeks the three of us (Andi, Zey and me) have been busy making progress and fleshing out our final project. It has come to a good point by now, but things still need to be cleaned out and some final touches are still missing. Previous week we had the chance to play test, people were interested in the general idea. One person suggested that it would be great to have more context as to what's happening in the visuals. We've discussed this in detail but the truth is the headband is at best capable of registering brain stimulation, so there's not much context we can give. This is a wave reading of the brain that goes through an FFT process and then we get different values each corresponding to different states of mind, but they seem more speculations than factual data. All we know is that the brain was stimulated or not. Also as we have seen with the various tests, there is noise involved too, so this project in my opinion is more an artistic capture of the participator's brain activity in a moment in time. The visuals came out acceptable, given that it's generated live with code. There has been many iterations since the first version seen below;
There were lots of challenges we faced along the way, particularly with the code, some are still there, like calculating the circular shape and starting and stopping it in a way that would fit our 9-minute piece. Also figuring out the actual raw EEG reading and performing an FFT on it was also something new, I have worked with FFT before but for sound. Thanks to Jason Snell, who provided us with this code and so we could implement the same logic on our project. We have a 9-minute piece which is made by stiching sounds from various frequencies together, with a bit of music in the beginning and the end, to guide the participator in and out of the experience as smoothly as possible. One other thing that we want to add is different color palettes, we want each graphic to be different than the other one, a unique sketch for each participant. We also want to add their names to the graphic, render it as an image and upload it on a web server. The initial plan was to print it but printers for arduino are not capable of handling color and this much complexity, so we abandoned that idea.
We can also control a light strip with the readings, we have not decided how to showcase the values as light yet, the plan was to play with brightness of just plain white LEDs to avoid distraction, but the strip is not capable of changing brightness smoothly, it flickers and it's still distracting. We currently have two modes one with values mapped to different RGB values to achieve color changes, one with plain white LED changing brightness
One thing that was mentioned during Andrianna's user testing class, was that the visuals kept going even when the headband was off! So I went into the code and after some debugging, figured out that the array for EEG values in fact was being filled faster than the visual could be drawn, so the waves were always lagging behind the actual current reading of the muse, it had to do with a weird for loop that I had created for drawing the waves around the iris, so instead I made them the same speed, now when the headband is off, it just keeps repeating the last readings and won't change, which shows that the drawing is in fact real-time;
Of course, the final plan is to stop drawing altogether whenever the headband is off. And also stop when it wraps around and finishes the circle. Currently it just keeps going forever and ever. I'm excited to showcase our project in tomorrow's user testing class and receive feedback on how we can improve the experience.
— Nima Niazi