Self Examination at the Mayhem Horror Festival

I have just returned from a busy weekend at the Mayhem Horror Film Festival in Nottingham helping stage Self Examination. Clever Plugs were collaborating with Brendan Walker of Aerial and the Mixed Reality Lab at Nottingham University to present live biofeedback monitoring of Horror Film Audiences. Clever Plugs created the real-time graphics for the performance, integrating bluetooth bio-data monitors with video and OpenGL graphics.

During five screenings over the weekend at the Broadway Cinema a chosen member of the audience was strapped into a wheelchair by the medical team from the “Thrill Laboratory” and wired up with electrodes to measure their bodies responses to the film they were watching. The data collected was turned into a graphic visualisation including live video and streamed into the bar area of the cinema for a secondary audience to enjoy.

Four streams of data were collected: EDA - Electrodermal activity, in effect the moisture content of the skin which reflects the level of the bodies fight/flight response. EKG - Elektrokardiogram, the familiar heart trace. EMG - Electromyographs measured the muscle activity of two groups of facial muscles for smiling and frowning, which closely follow the individual’s emotions of pleasure and displeasure.

The graphics drawn were styled to resemble traditional oscilloscope based medical monitoring equipment, with thin green trace lines and small triangular pointers. These were drawn with OpenGL over the top of a live video feed from an infra-red camera attached to the wheelchair.

As part of the development Clever Plugs have created “Biofeed” a flexible new Python library for working with bio-data visualisation, which we are sharing with our collaborators in this project. If anyone is interested in using it do get in touch.

Paul