The Moody Web and Bodyblogger project are currently down for the time being as we transition to the new Twitter API. Should be back online over the weekend.
EDIT:
And we’re back online. Was expecting it take longer than my lunch break. Trying to sort this yesterday at Jelly Liverpool was a disaster as I’d somehow corrupted the mysql library trying to install CURL on the web server (MOWES portable).
Tagged wipThe problem with collecting in any amount of data is figuring out how to present that data in a manner that is meaningful for its intended audience. For example if you want to assess the physical effort you exert during a run a plot of physiological activity (e.g. heartbeat rate) against time will provide you with a relatively simple visual representation of how your body adapts to physical stress.
Tagged body blogs, visualisationWe’re sporting a new look this month here at Physiological Computing, several in fact, as we’ve turned the web interface into an online mood ring. Using the online heartbeat rate of our body blogger (read more here on the BodyBlogger) the colour scheme of the site is set according to the users current physiological state.
Currently 4 colour schemes are supported: -
 Offline |
 Relaxed |
 Normal |
 Elevated |
 Burning |
|---|
Each scheme is mapped onto a different physiological range which are as follows: -
These ranges and their implied state have been configured for our current body blogger who transitions through them on a daily basis (e.g. burning – running).
I’ll be updating more about the Moody Web later on this week, for the time being enjoy our take on adding a touch of the personal to the web.
The Emotiv system is a EEG headset designed for the development of brain-computer interfaces. It uses 12 dry electrodes (i.e. no gel necessary), communicates wirelessly with a PC and comes with a range of development software to create applications and interfaces. If you watch this 10min video from TEDGlobal, you get a good overview of how the system works.
First of all, I haven’t had any hands-on experience with the Emotiv headset and these observations are based upon what I’ve seen and read online. But the talk at TED prompted a number of technical questions that I’ve been unable to satisfy in absence of working directly with the system.
Continue reading ›
In April there was a rumour going around that the next Red Steel (the third in the series) might support the Wii Vitality. The gameplay in Red Steel is a mixture of first person shooting and first person sword fighting. In the last Red Steel the combat system felt very similar to that of two-player fighting games like Street Fighter as apart from the basic sword fighting techniques you can perform with the Wii controller (e.g. blocking and striking) you could also pull off a range of special moves with different combinations of gestures and key presses. I’m a big fan of the Red Steel franchise and I believe it would be an interesting series to explore biofeedback based gameplay mechanics as both the mythos and the physical skillset being simulated in Red Steel lends itself well to intrinsically interesting physiological manipulations (e.g. as your playing a swordsman, “zen” powers aren’t too much of stretch for your suspension of disbelief). Below I’ve made a couple of suggestions as to what biofeedback based gameplay mechanics you might find in the next Red Steel game if it uses the Wii Vitality: -
Tagged BioHarness, game design, pulse-oximeter, Red Steel, videogames, Wii VitalityI recently read a paper by Rosalind Picard entitled “emotion research for the people, by the people.” In this article, Prof. Picard has some fun contrasting engineering and psychological perspectives on the measurement of emotion. Perhaps I’m being defensive but she seemed to have more fun poking fun at the psychologists than the engineers, but the central impasse that she identified goes something like this: engineers develop sensor apparatus that can deliver a whole range of objective data whilst psychologists have decades of experience with theoretical concepts related to emotion, so why haven’t people really benefited from their union through the field of affective computing. Prof. Picard correctly identifies a reluctance on the part of the psychologists to define concepts with sufficient precision to aid the work of the engineers. What I felt was glossed over in the paper was the other side of the problem, namely the willingness of engineers to attach emotional labels to almost any piece of psychophysiological data, usually in the context of badly-designed experiments (apologies to any engineers reading this, but I wanted to add a little balance to the debate).
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A new page has been added to the navigation bar. “The Body Blogger” concerns our work in live blogging a user’s physiological state to the web and what impact it may have on the user as well as their audience. The body blog can be found at http://twitter.com/bodyblogger.
Tagged body blogs, heartbeat, Twitter