Gadgetory

this is Russell Brandon with the verge and right now this machine is scanning my brain it's part of the art project mental fabrications basically I'm gonna watch this video and then the signals from my brain are going to be turned into a 3d model that we can 3d print I'm actually the first person to do this they tell me it's safe so let's see what happens the team shot a lot of really close-up 4k footage of these sorts of natural phenomenon they're these metal shavings there are hydrophobic blobs they're burning matches and the question is what's happening in my brain as I'm watching this what does the the geography of the mind look like that's that's the question that we're trying to answer and creating these models through the 3d printer using EEG machines and and head gears we can start exploring the the landscapes of the human mind so using the video we can actually create these moments where through relaxation or through concentration or their stimulus the brain can start pushing in and out of this in this landscape which is pretty much a plane creating these these topographies when it's over you get a 3d model that looks like this filled through whatever was happening in your head all that meditation concentration whatever was in there turns into these peaks and valleys and textures what results is kind of like this cloth that has been pushed up and down with different kind of hills creating a kind of topography or or landscape and if you are calm then more calm than focused then that hill will be poked up and if you are focused more focus than calm that Hill will be pointing down they're doing all this with a desktop size MakerBot the standard consumer grade 3d printer popping says it makes prototyping easier and faster and it makes the final product feel more precise less organic if you want to make a digital rendering into a tangible object this is the easiest way when you look at the model you can actually see okay and this instant I was so focused or I was so calm in my mind or kind of like a mixture between the two EEG was created to monitor epileptics and coma patients and we're still figuring out what the readings mean for a healthy adult brain the first wave of EEG products were simple games like pong controlled by raising their alpha waves but the signal wasn't reliable enough to really work as a proper interface Hopkins onto something else treating the signals interesting in itself it's not science anymore it's art these technologies don't have a specific role as of yet but we can find kind of and hack them to use as our installation technologies to use them as generators of form you