Bit of a Ramble on Experiencing Biofeedback Games & A Video on Consumer Devices

Ever since my undergrad supervisor got me interested in designing biofeedback games I’ve been hooked. When you research biofeedback games you see a lot of cool and interesting things from your fellow researchers but getting to experience those systems is very difficult. For example, the adaptive Tetris game we developed at Liverpool John Moores University uses a Biosemi EEG which is prohibitively expensive. If anyone else was going to experience the game they’d either have to already have the setup we used to run the game or need to rebuild the EEG processing pipeline to make it work.

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Playful by Design Gaming Symposium, April 5th-7th

The 1st Annual Playful by Design Spring Symposium, will be held on April 5th-7th. The event kicks off Thursday at 3:00pm with an Opening Reception for a new exhibit at the Spurlock Museum: Past Time Pastimes: Vintage Board Games.  On Friday, the Keynote Address by game designer Colleen Macklin will follow a day of demos, panels and discussions at the Armory. Saturday, the Champaign-Urbana Community Fablab will host a Games & Gaming Make-a-thon!
Online registration for all events is Now Open!

I will be presenting at the History of Games & Gaming session on biofeedback games in the morning and will also be chairing the gaming technology session in the afternoon.

The gaming technology session will be discussing how technology can facilitate new  & exciting player experiences. We have a fantastic line-up of speakers from the university and local games industry including CU-Adventures, Human-Interact, Volition Games.

Dark Escape 4D in Chicago!

I was recently visiting Chicago for the 4th of July fireworks and lo-and-behold I came across another Dark Escape 4D arcade cabinet!

You can find this delightfully hard as balls competitive/cooperative biofeedback gun game at Dave and Busters on N Clark Street. For a biofeedback game this model sure gets about, I’ve played it now in three countries: Blackpool (UK), Juan Les Pins (France) and Chicago (US).

You can view my let’s play of the game on the old research blog here.

More fun with smart bulbs, this time the Ilumi

They say “third times the charm”? It’ll have to be at the rate I’m going through smart bulbs. After the disaster that was the C by GE that I tried over the summer I bought myself an Ilumi LED Smartbulb. I saw a demo of the Ilumi in action and thought it would be a perfect fit for my office. Sadly despite the bulbs positives, (1) high lumen output and (2) range of lighting configurations (e.g. RGB), it has several flaws which make it unusable, at least for me.

Ilumi Smart Bulb
Ilumi Smart Bulb

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Call for Papers – Multimedia Tools for Physiological Computing – Springer Journal

Special Issue Call for Papers
Multimedia Tools and Applications, Springer Journal
http://www.springer.com/journal/11042
A Special Issue on “Multimedia Tools for Physiological Computing”
Special issue editors:

  • Alan Pope (NASA Langley Research Center, U.S.A.)
  • Hugo Plácido da Silva (IT – Institute of Telecommunications, Portugal)
  • Kiel Gilleade (Biofeedback Technology Consultant, U.S.A.)

Contact: hsilva@lx.it.pt
Deadline for Submissions: 30th November 2016 25th January 2017
Download CFP
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Screen mirroring GearVR from a Samsung S6 onto a PC

UPDATE (01/19):  Unfortunately this software no longer works without rooting your Android device. I have not currently tried this.

Earlier this year I bought a GearVR for dev work. While I’ve not had much time to work with the device I have spent some time playing around with the apps. The app offerings on the Oculus store, up until recently, have been somewhat lack luster but there is one place the GearVR shines and that’s as a party piece for when friends are over.
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Dumb Smart Bulbs

I recently picked up some C by GE smart bulbs at the Maker Faire in DC. The GE stall was giving away samples and I managed to get both versions of their smart bulb line: the life and sleep bulbs. I’ve been meaning to pick up some smart bulbs in order to experiment with dynamic lighting, specifically mood controlled lighting and this seemed like the opportune moment to try it out.

C by GE Smart Bulb
C by GE Smart Bulb

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Musing about the Muse’s Signal Quality

I’ve been looking to buy a new consumer grade EEG headset to replace my MindBand. While I like the form factor of the MindBand it’s limited to a single channel of EEG. There were murmurs of a 2 channel EEG at the time the headset was purchased, back in 2012, but I never managed to find where to purchase it, and it was possible the adverts were confusing the electrode count with the channel count.
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