Self Examination at the Mayhem Horror Festival

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 11:38:34 +0000

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

A spoonful of "Sugar" for Brainstorm's eStudio

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0100

We just came back from Brainstorm’s 12th User Conference, where we were demoing some of our Brainstorm-specific products, like the Chromakey plugin and the Web-browser plugin. But we also introducing a new python API to the Brainstorm flagship product eStudio (it’s an all-singing all-dancing 3d authoring software platform for making realtime graphics, largely for broadcast). There’s an intro and tutorial at http://cleverplugs.com/sugar. It will be a standard part of v12 of eStudio, but you can always ignore it and keep using the old API.

This new programming API is called “Sugar” (it’s a bit of ’syntactic sugar’ for eStudio) and it is an alternative to the existing python interface which is largely a port of much of the flat, string-based C-interface and doesn’t feel very friendly to Python programmers. The new interface enables a coding style which is more concise, more expressive (and so more readable) and, being object-orientated, allows use of quick python constructs. The net result should be faster and more accurate coding, and more complex scripts being attainable. At present it is not appropriate for real-time scripting (it is really intended for authoring and setup constructs), but there are plenty of optimizations possible – let us know what you think of it and where you’d like it to go.

Since the conference we’ve added a drag and drop sugar console to the sugar distribution and a button to translate the most commonly used code from the old API to the new one. We’ve also added a mailing list, so you can be kept informed of updates as they happen: sign up for sugar updates, or any other Clever Plugs mailing, at http://cleverplugs.com/news.html

Clever Plugs blog

Self Examination at the Mayhem Horror Festival

A spoonful of "Sugar" for Brainstorm's eStudio