This week I did extensive research on the final project for this class. Without further ado, the working title for my project is called
but might change based on my feeling. The question makes a game out of the existential dread we get from doomscrolling. Are you able to stay calm and collected for enough time to win?
Here’s a basic storyboard of what the user experience will look like:
A user will put on the EEG headset, then mount their phone with twitter open onto the phone stand. Then the game will start; the user has to keep themselves in a meditative state for as long as the game runs, which will be marked with light blue neopixels lighting up around the mount like a loading bar. If the EEG detects too many active brain waves, the mount will light up in a fail state and reset. But if you manage to keep your cool the entire time, the mount will light up green!
The star of the show will be hacking a Toy EEG. There are a few commercial ‘brain wave detectors’ out there on the market, as outlined by this non-exhaustive chart from Frontier Nerd’s blog:
Since its publication since 2010, more products have come out like NeuroSky’s MindWave, the Muse Headband, and this Star Wars Brain sensing toy. Based on cost and ease of hacking, I plan to follow the Frontier Nerd’s tutorial and hack a Mind Flex headset I’ll get off eBay. I may check out a MindWave from ITP’s equipment room to start getting data while I wait.
The hacking doesn’t seem too hard, but will incorporate breaking open the headband and soldering my own connections, while also mounting the Arduino Nano somewhere.
The other component will be the phone stand, which will use a servo motor to scroll and neopixels to reflect the game state. I’m thinking of getting a simple string of Neopixels from adafruit and lining them around the phone stand. I will program the servo with a simple swiping motion and run a small electrical current through the arm to control the touch screen.
Here’s a bank of all the links I’ve found helpful for my project so far. Will keep updated as I keep working!