Week 13&14 - Final Project
The user testing taught me so many great things about my approach and the limitations and fallbacks of the project. We received various comments on what the waves meant, and that they wanted something concrete attached to them, but that's the thing with EEG sensors, that no one really knows what the readings precisely show. One other feedback was that it made almost no sense to have these visuals being drawn in front of the person while we requested them to close their eyes. I think the response to that would be that this whole thing can be interpreted as a show for others to witness, or we can think of the visual as a reward, which will be handed at the end of the session, and the process of it being drawn is just part of the backstage procedures. We had really useful feedback for our project from Tom Igoe too, he suggested we could have the participant do various activities and record their brainwaves to showcase the different results with different activities, which can be a nice future extension of this project. He also mentioned how most of these headbands don't seem to be a reliable data source and they have too much noise, which is true in my experience, the readings are far from consistent, and I hoped to see more accurate readings based on the advertisements I had seen, but sadly it's not the case, maybe with some advanced technology it is possible but in case of this particular headband, it's not there yet. His other feedback was to design the backstage, in a way that the whole experience becomes seamless for the participant, we decided to add a physcial tangible element for the person to hold and let go whenevenr they wanted to initiate or abort the experience, rather than having an operator jump back and forth between the lap top and them trying to initaite and stop the process, which was really distracting.
The physical component we added is a baby yoda doll, with neopixel lights wrapped around it, and a capacitive sensor placed inside the fabrics of its clothing. There is an arduino inside the doll to which the capacitive sensor and the neopixels are connected, so that it would light up and send a trigger through serial communication to the sketch that it has been touched, then the process of reading and writing the EEG data begins which then draws the waves on the sketch. There are two circles being drawn the outer circle is an average of all the waves and the inner circle is the alpha wave. The only clear result in the user tests we had was the picture below, where there is a clear contrast between the person meditating and them talking and having their eyes open.
The code for the whole sketch can be found here
Overall it was fun to dig deeper into the EEG technology, with the particular headband that I've tried I don't see higher potential than what I've already done. Maybe with newer and better technology better results can be achieved. But in general, the thing with anything brain-related and consciousness-related is that it is still not fully understood and the whole thing is a mystery even in modern science. We have speculations and not concrete evidence for most claims.
— Nima Niazi