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Nov 13

• Daniel Liss
  • Lucid Dreaming Assistance Device - Lucid dreams are those in which the dreamer is aware that he is dreaming. In this state the dreamer can steer his dreams, writing the script in real time. Benefits include ending the recurrence of nightmares, enabling creativity, and the exploration of self. Various theories point to the possibility of lasting psychological breakthroughs, as well. I plan to build a device which senses the onset of the REM cycle, the period during which the most intense dreaming occurs. Upon sensing this onset, the device triggers a sound component in the dreamer's pillow, reminding him that he is, in fact, dreaming. Planting a recognizable stimulus such as this has been linked to the creation of lucid dreams...
• Justin Downs
  • HOMEostasis, Putting the ME into hoME: my idea is to create a input into a environmental system based on biometric data. Right now it consists of a users offering their heart rate and galvanic skin response into a self organizing computer application which controls the surrounding environment (such as house lighting, temperature or how often your email is checked) like HAL from 2001 but you can't lie it, or want to lie to it. hopefully developing a usable conversation between it and i.
• Lesley Flanigan
  • "Headphone Space" -- By modifying headphones, I intend to investigate how our sense of space is affected by mediating technologies. Headphones negotiate a sonic space between personal and private life by adding, subtracting, and recontexualizing meaning in our daily lives. In both their intended functionality and in metaphor, headphones open a poetic space for exploring human relationships with the world. Modified headphones will include: Headphone Recorder, Headphone Mixer, Headphone Heterotopia.
• Sinan Ascioglu
  • Eyes on You Tarantino! I am seeking the ways to express the secondary-art emerging in the movies, which is the viewers eye movements. Tracking user's eye movements while they are watching movie scenes from different directors, I would like to create a visualization in which both the difference among the scenes/directors would be observed, and users interacting with my project would have the chance to explore the movie in a different environment other than -forward/backward- buttons. I also have a second idea, 'Communist Movie Watching Experience' which is a glasses which the users are only allowed to see through a pinhole in the lens of the glasses. This pinhole moves according to the collected data of previous movie watchers, so the new user is only allowed to see/look where previous users looked/watched.
• Sonia Nelson
  • "O.Art" or some more clever name. I want to visualize sexual climax using heart rate sensors as the input device. My (totally uniformed) hypothesis is twofold: 1) Heart rate speeds up as climax nears; 2) Two lovers' heart rates begin to synch as climax nears.
• Caleb Clark & Lucas Longo:
  • Busted! What you looking at? A game that explores the human instinct to "check out" people's bodies. How much do we do it unconsciously? Can we control it? Players will try not to check out people's bodies in less then (<10second) scenes from popular movies. They play the game by peering into a stationary case equipped with an eye tracking camera and a small monitor. A second monitor above the case will display the scene being viewed and the player's eye placement. Both monitors will flash "Busted!" on the screen when player's eyes spend too much time gazing at private parts. Scenes will progress to more and more provocative content.
• Dan Soltis
  • Autonomic Transmissions. This is part of a project I am pursuing in another class (Collaborative Mesh Networking) to work on mobile sensors for autonomic functions and mood, and to develop protocols for networking these sensors in ways that allow class members to choose from a shared pool of sensor data for use in various applications. The individual application I am interested in is simply wireless transmission of heartbeats between paired users. In one incarnation, users near each other (within 200 feet or so) would continually feel each other's heartbeats as vibration. In another incarnation, a user would, for chosen periods of time, transmit his or her heartbeat over the internet to a distant person.

Nov 20

• Kyveli Vezani & Yan Yan Cao
  • Subjectivity of Language(s)" Hypothesis: We understand each other through our individual experiences (cultural background, life experiences, etc). as a result, the meaning each person tends to take in is slightly different. Our last week’s experiment was taking a bi/multi- lingual approach to illustrate and test this hypothesis. Different languages are one of thy the meaning we take in is different. We used different languages and bad translations to amplify the effect. Therefore, we think that if we show a similar effect using only one language the hypothesis will be stronger.

OR

• (how) can the body communicate emotional states through biometric data?

there is a great interest in devices that respond/adapt to the user's mood, where the mood is determined through biometric input. I am quite suspicious of how accurate such measurements could be, so I want to create a device that takes user's biometric data (heart rate, GSR, breathing rate?) and arbitrarily maps the data onto a chromatic code (tri-color LED --possibly also other display features such as rhythm (pulsating light) could be factored into the display). The user will be able to see this information visualization and over time, will be able to find out whether there is a certain correlation between his/her mood and the chromatic code, and try to decipher the code. After using the device the user could fine-tune the code to make it more responsive to stimuli that seem to be important to the specific mood. (if high pulse rate indicates both states of anger or joy, but added information of GSR or breathing rate or sound levels can help distinguish between the two, then the secondary information will be used to refine the code.)

If there seems to be a correlation between emotional states and biometric data, then it can be applied to other uses. The relationship between the user and the visualization device (which will probably take the form of a bracelet with RGB leds) is also a possible exploration of the project, if it is decided that the link between biometric data and mood is too tenuous. Then the focus of this project will be more about decoding the "language of our body," and treating the information as something separate from what we are cognizant of, information that stems from beyond our awareness. The user would then be receiving information about her body that she might not otherwise be aware of, which might lead to a feeling of otherness from the body.

• Tom Jenkins
  • I'm making a musical instrument that uses biofeedback to modulate tones.
• Young Chung
  • "Happy Ritual" -- positive psychology + interactive prayer, unconsciousness to consciousness to unconsciousness. An active helper of creating ritual behavior which user think important but easily be forgotten. An idea is derived from the positive psychology book Happier by Ben-Shahar, and Muslim who pray five times a day at fixed times. I agree and believe that we can be happier while doing important and meaningful things unconsciously, and it needs some sort of ritual before being accustomed to. Technologically, I will start with SMS text message method I brought through class and hopefully use Google Android soon.
• Sarah Grant
• Michael Dory
  • "Telecommunihug" -- As technologists and artists (and nerds), we live incredibly stressful, increasingly isolated lives. Much of our day is spent hunched over a computer, with little or no human contact to give us perspective on our world and provide an emotional balance. I'm aiming to help that a bit with [name], a service that has your back -- in an emotional sense. It watches for an excess of stressed, sad or angry words in your typing patterns, and when it detects an over-use, it triggers a phone call to cheer you up/calm you down. What I'm hoping to show is that (A) that I can detect moods by typing patterns , (B) that it's actually calming to hear a voice cheering you up, and (C) phone calls are more humanizing than computer notes.
• Jeff Sable