Planet Arduino

Clara is a smart lamp able to respond to your brain waves and subtly adjust your environment. The project, running on Arduino Uno, was created by  Marcelo Mejía Cobo, Belen Tenorio, and Josh Sucher for a class at the School of Visual Arts in NYC (US).

The team worked with the Neurosky MindWave Mobile, a Bluetooth EEG-reading headset in order to wirelessly detect “attention” and map the lamp’s color temperature and speaker volume accordingly:

At first, the lamp emits a warm, comforting glow, conducive to idea generation and creativity. But as you start homing in on a specific idea, the light becomes crisper and cooler, and the volume of the ambient noise flowing from the embedded speaker slowly increases, enhancing your ability to concentrate and block out external distractions.

In the picture below you can see the inside of the lamp with the Arduino Uno and Adafruit Music Maker shield:

Explore the Arduino Sketch on Github.

by wavelet_spaghetti @ instructables.com:

Ever wanted to visualize your brain activity in real-time? Move an object on a screen with your mind? EEG devices are fantastic fun and allow you to do such things!

This tutorial will show you how to make an illumino: an easy-to-use recreational EEG device hidden inside a comfortable beanie, that turns your brain activity into an array of colorful light. Colors and brightness are manually selectable and adjustable via a small discreet pushbutton switch. The custom Arduino software is accessible via a USB port, allowing you to easily change it as you wish. The hat also works fine without the lights, should you wish to use it only as an EEG device. I recommend using Processing to create beautiful real-time moving graphical visualizations of your brain activity (code included in tutorial).

Build an EEG hat that turns your brainwaves into light! - [Link]

“Trataka” by Alessio Chierico is an interactive installation controlled by Arduino and based on a brain-computer interface. It was exhibited at Ars Electronica last week. When a visitor totally relaxes and focuses, the candle magically extinguishes:

Trataka is a Sanskrit term which means “to look” or “to gaze” and it refers to a meditation technique. This practice consists in concentrate the attention in a small object, or more commonly in a flame. In meditation, this technique is used to stimulate the ajna chakra: a point located in correspondence of the brain. According to the Hindu tradition, this chakra is one of the six main centers of vital energy, and it is considered as the eye of the intuition and the intellect.

This installation is composed by a brain-computer interface that detect the brain waves and defines parameters like the level of attention. Wearing this device, the user is invited to concentrate his attention on a flame placed in front of him. The level of attention detected by this system, controls an air flow located under the flame: higher level corresponds with a more intense air flow. The interaction process aims to the user engagement for increase his attention in order to put the flame out. This will happen when the highest level of attention is reached: the air flow become strong enough to extinguish the flame.