Hello Everyone:
For those of you in the United States, Happy Memorial Day. Please take a minute to thank a veteran for their daily sacrifices so we can enjoy our freedoms. For those of you in the UK and Europe who just participated in elections, well done. I want to send a special congratulations to the people of the Ukraine, who just elected a new president. I want to remind all of you that now comes the hard part, governing. Things will not get better overnight or next week. It'll take time and not setting the bar of expectations too high. Also for everyone, I'd like to make aware of a worthy cause that could use some love, Wounded Warrior Project. This organization is dedicated to meeting the needs of injured veterans, regardless of what war they served in. It's a terrific organization that's dedicated to doing more for our men and women in uniform than the Veteran's Administration. To check them out, please go to http://www.woundedwarriorproject.org. Thanks
Woman having her brain responses measured simpleusability.com |
Sarah Goodyear begins by describing her experience. Ms. Goodyear relates walking down her familiar cobbled street in Brooklyn's DUMBO neighborhood, wearing an EEG device that resembles a cumbersome looking headset. Her words, "...I resembled a character in a 1990s sci-fi rendering of the Future..." The researchers instructed her to walk at a "museum pace," meaning slowly, maintaining a robot-like (stiff) torso. What the researchers actually meant was that if she saw something that interested her in a shop window, Ms. Goodyear was to turn her whole body, robot-like, pointing to the iPod Touch device in her hand in the direction of her gaze. Ms. Goodyear admits to feeling a little self-conscious but in this trendy New York neighborhood, the residents are conscious (or act too cool) not to act too surprised at anything out of the ordinary-even in the name of science.
Participants in the Van Alen study citylab.com |
Mark Collins, on the main people behind the brain-imaging study, and his colleagues have been toying with the ever evolving and increasingly mobile technology that permits us to monitor our brain waves, with the hopes of harnessing the information in order to better understand how people interact with their urban and architectural environment. Recently, the researchers have been working with the relatively inexpensive technology, the subjects are wearing in their tour through the DUMBO neighborhood, EEG biosensors from a company called Neurosky.
Title page for study azuremagazine.com |
The Neurosky device transparentcorp.com |
The researchers mapped out a several-block square area of DUMBO because the neighborhood held a diverse group of urban settings. There are grand pieces of infrastructure such as the Manhattan Bridge; the narrow cobbled streets with boutiques and galleries; a public waterfront park; quiet residential and office blocks. Not every participant through every inch of the designated area. Different groups took different paths, with the help of guides to keep everyone from wandering off, getting lost, and troubleshoot any hard- or software issues. An earlier version, using a single walker traveling around Lincoln Center, yielded a prototyped used by the team. Mark Collins told Sarah Goodyear that "it reflected an interesting result: when the subject was in parts of Lincoln Center plaza that are more open to the city's streets, he recorded more 'meditative' brain waves; when he was in the more enclosed and architecturally circumscribed ultramodernist part of the campus, his response was more attentive."
A view of the Manhattan Bridge from DUMBO en.wikipedia.org |
Mark Collins believes that interacting with data generating devices will become increasingly common just as wearing the now ubiquitous fitbit has become. However, BCIs require more active participation from the user than a fitness tracker. Devices such as Google Glass could make participation easier but wearing such a device can induce a feeling of self-consciousness. Case in point, Ms. Goodyear wrote, "The other day in Dumbo, I didn't look at the app where my results were showing while I was walking for fear of creating misleading results (or getting hit by a car). So I wasn't able to see whether I was in a meditative mode or attentive mode at any given point..." Understandable, the conspicuousness of the device could cause whole host of ambivalent feelings about wearing one and the feeling that everyone is pointing and laughing at you. I hope Ms. Goodyear didn't check instagram or YouTube, kidding, maybe?
Sarah Goodyear concludes that perhaps interacting with BCIs will be more common in the future, even as the backlash to the smartphone, tablet computer, Google Glass continues. Ms. Goodyear doesn't foresee any love affairs a la Her but she speculates that we may find ourselves bonding with our devices in unexpected ways, if we aren't already. "It's beyond sci-fi how these things are evolving together," says Mark Collins. "It's not a human becoming a computer or a computer becoming a human. It's a participatory framework between the two, and each becomes a little more like the other."
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