Tag Archives: Nancy Owano

‘Genius’ gamers develop mind-controlled skateboard

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Chaotic Moon Labs, developer of the mind-controlled skateboard ‘Board of Imagination’, is a mobile games company where they continually inform you that they are geniuses/smarter than you are/etc. Clearly not a shy group of people nor believers of the ‘underpromise and overdeliver’ philosophy of business. They have recently announced (from a Feb. 26, 2012 news item by Nancy Owano on physorg.com) their latest project,

The Board of Imagination is a skateboard that carries the same Samsung tablet with Windows 8 and the same 800 watt electric motor as the earlier skateboard [Board of Awesomeness], but now sports a headset. With it, the board will read the rider’s mind and will move anywhere the rider imagines.

The skateboard can translate brain waves into action such that the user visualizes a point off in the distance and thinks about the speed in which to travel to get there. The skateboard does the rest.

This reminds me of B-Reel’s (a European advertising company) mind control project with toy racing cars (mentioned in my Oct. 6, 2011 posting) although this time it’s a much larger device. Here’s the YouTube-posted video produced by Chaotic Moon Labs,

I wonder if this Board of Imagination is going to be shown at the upcoming SXSW (South by SouthWest) shows which run from March 9 – 18, 2012 in Austin, Texas where this company (Chaotic Moon, the lab is their R&D [research and development] group) is located, according to Owano’s article.

An EPOC headset from Emotiv is being used as the mind reading device which somehow translates your brain waves into commands that your skateboard obeys. Emotiv and its sister company, Emotiv Lifesciences, by the way, were founded by Tan Le who gave a talk about her company and her work at TEDxWomen. The video is here, I’ve not had time to watch it yet. So if you get there before I do, please let me know what you think.

 

Making sounds with gestures

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It’s kind of haptic; it’s kind of gestural; and it’s all about the sound, Mogees. Here’s the video,

Mogees – Gesture recognition with contact-microphones from bruno zamborlin on Vimeo.

In case what you’ve just seen interests you, here are some more details from the Jan. 5, 2012 article by Nancy Owano for physorg.com,

 The Mogees is a project that stems from the department of computing at Goldsmiths, University of London, where researcher Bruno Zamborlin collaborates with a team at IRCAM [Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique] in Paris to experiment with new methods for “gestural interaction” in coming up with novel ways of making sounds. … The video shows the use of a contact microphone and audio processing software to construct a gesture-recognizing touch interface from assorted surfaces—a tree trunk, a balloon, a glass panel at a bus stage, and an inflated balloon. Also, different gestures control different sounds.

As to how that microphone and audio processing software work, here’s an explanation from Sebastian Anthony’s Jan. 4, 2012 article for ExtremeTech,

First of all, that little silver nugget — which seems to utilize some kind of suction cup — contains multiple microphones to create a stereo image of the sounds it hears. Second, that black cable connects to a PC of some kind; probably a laptop, considering the guy plays music on a tree and a bus shelter. On the PC, the vibrations of your fingers tapping on the surface are analyzed and converted into gestures, and then MaxMSP — a visual programming language for creating music and other multimedia experiences — turns the gestures into sounds.

You can get more information about Bruno Zamborlin at his website and you can find more about Mogees here at Goldsmith’s. I highly recommend reading the two articles mentioned.